Institute of Bioinformatics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Muenster, Niels Stensen Strasse 14, Muenster 48149, Germany.
Biol Direct. 2013 Jan 28;8:4. doi: 10.1186/1745-6150-8-4.
Twintrons represent a special intronic arrangement in which introns of two different types occupy the same gene position. Consequently, alternative splicing of these introns requires two different spliceosomes competing for the same RNA molecule. So far, only two twintrons have been described in insects. Surprisingly, we discovered several such arrangements in vertebrate genomes, which are quite conserved throughout the lineages.
Twintrons 代表一种特殊的内含子排列方式，其中两种不同类型的内含子占据同一基因位置。因此，这些内含子的可变剪接需要两个不同的剪接体竞争同一 RNA 分子。到目前为止，昆虫中只描述了两个 twintrons。令人惊讶的是，我们在脊椎动物基因组中发现了几个这样的排列，这些排列在整个进化过程中都相当保守。
