hello,
i want to know why can't we talk about exon in bacteria ? It was reported in the literature that this term: exon is specific to eucaryotic organisms,. but we can find introns in some bacteria. What prevents us from using the term exon in bacteria ?
Thanks
Bacterial gene do not possess intron, their coding sequences are not interupted. Besides if there were intron they would have to be removed and bacterias lack spliceosome machinery. Dont get confused will polycistronic RNA in which you have several gene on the same cistron, the spacing between them is not intron, its the short UTRs and RBS, it also contain translation regulating structure such as loops.
If there is an intron, there must also be an exon, or else the intron is not an intron in the first place.
In higher eucaryotes there are often many introns within a gene, so one needs to specify what segments of a gene are coding and what are introns. However in bacteria introns are very rare and most genes have none. In those very rare instances where there is an intron there is usually only one. So there is no need to define the coding regions in that way. So there is nothing that would prevent you from using the term, but it is just not useful in any way.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ckingsf/bioinfo-lectures/genefinding.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3984707/
thanks all of you for this very constructive discussion:
*dear mr Hugo,
sure bacteria lack spliceosome machinery, but some strains (such as Agrobacterium tumefaciens, Azoarcus sp) possessing introns (group I Introns: tRNA) are able to remove them by self-splicing mechanism.
https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v357/n6374/abs/357173a0.html
Dear Mr Michael,
Thank you for the response.
Are we sure that there is one intron in some bacteria?
hi
Sequences that are joined together in the final mature RNA after RNA splicing areexons. Introns are found in the genes of most organisms and many viruses, and can be located in a wide range of genes, including those that generate proteins, ribosomal RNA (rRNA), and transfer RNA (tRNA).
bacteria gene not have intron
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