Goodall G J, Filipowicz W
Friedrich Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland.
Plant Mol Biol. 1990 May;14(5):727-33. doi: 10.1007/BF00016505.
When exogenous genes are to be expressed in transgenic plants, their RNAs must be correctly processed. To gain information useful for predicting whether foreign introns will be accurately spliced, we have analysed the processing of an artificial gene in maize and Nicotiana plumbaginifolia protoplasts. A synthetic plant intron, devised to contain the elements necessary for pre-mRNA splicing in dicots, was found to be efficiently spliced in a monocot (maize) transient expression system. A series of deletion mutants of the synthetic intron was constructed to assess the minimum functional intron length. In both monocots and dicots this was found to be between 70 and 73 nt. This length requirement is similar to that seen in vertebrates, but significantly greater than that in fungi and insects.
当外源基因要在转基因植物中表达时，其RNA必须得到正确加工。为了获取有助于预测外源内含子是否会被准确剪接的信息，我们分析了玉米和烟草叶肉原生质体中一个人工基因的加工情况。一个设计用于包含双子叶植物前体mRNA剪接所需元件的合成植物内含子，被发现在单子叶植物（玉米）瞬时表达系统中能有效剪接。构建了一系列合成内含子的缺失突变体，以评估最小功能内含子长度。在单子叶植物和双子叶植物中，这个长度都在70到73个核苷酸之间。这种长度要求与在脊椎动物中看到的相似，但明显大于真菌和昆虫中的要求。
