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Intron evolution
There are two competing theories that offer alternative scenarios for the origin and early
evolution of
spliceosomal introns. Other classes of introns such as self-splicing and
tRNA introns are not subject to much debate, but see
[10] for the former. These are popularly referred to as the Introns-Early (IE) and the Introns-Late (IL) views.
[11]
The
IE model, championed by Walter Gilbert,
[12] proposes that introns are extremely old and numerously present in the earliest theoretical ancestors of
prokaryotes and
eukaryotes, the
progenotes. In this model, introns were subsequently lost from prokaryotic organisms, allowing them to attain growth efficiency. A central prediction of this theory is that the early introns were mediators that facilitated the recombination of exons that represented the protein domains.
[13] This model cannot account for some observed positional variation of introns shared among related genes.
[14]
The
IL model proposes that introns were recently inserted into originally intron-less contiguous genes after the divergence of eukaryotes and prokaryotes. In this model, introns probably originated from
transposable elements. This model is based on the observation that the spliceosomal introns are restricted to eukaryotes alone. However, there is considerable debate over the presence of introns in the early prokaryote-eukaryote ancestors and the subsequent intron loss-gain during eukaryotic evolution.
[15] The evolution of introns and of the intron-exon structure may be largely independent of the evolution of coding-sequences.
[16]