A Test of the Null Model for 5' UTR Evolution Based on GC Content

sea-maid submitted, created time 8 months 1 day (mbe.oxfordjournals.org)

Eukaryotic mRNAs are headed by a stretch of noncoding sequence, the 5' untranslated region (UTR). It has been proposed that the length of 5' UTRs is selectively neutral and evolves under a process of stochastic destruction and recruitment of core promoter elements, combined with selection against the premature initiation of translation. The authors of this research test this null model by investigating whether 5' UTR length varies with genomic GC content, an implicit prediction of the model.

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Evolutionary Conservation of UTR Intron Boundaries in Cryptococcus

alpha submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (mbe.oxfordjournals.org)

"Despite significant progress, the general functional and evolutionary significance of the untranslated regions (UTRs) of eukaryotic transcripts remain mysterious. Particularly mysterious is the common occurrence of spliceosomal introns in transcript UTRs because UTR splicing is not necessary for restoration of transcript coding sequence. In general, it is not known to what extent such splicing performs an important function or merely represents spliceosomal "noise." We conducted the first analysis of evolutionary conservation of UTR splicing

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