RESEARCH ARTICLE
Statistics of Exon Lengths in Fungi
Alexander Kaplunovsky1, David Zabrodsky2, Zeev Volkovich2, Anatoliy Ivashchenko3, Alexander Bolshoy*, 1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2010Volume: 4
First Page: 31
Last Page: 40
Publisher ID: TOBIOIJ-4-31
DOI: 10.2174/1875036201004010031
Article History:
Received Date: 01/06/2010Revision Received Date: 12/10/2010
Acceptance Date: 13/10/2010
Electronic publication date: 03/11/2010
Collection year: 2010
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The exon-intron structures of fungi genes are quite different from each other, and the evolution of such structures raises many questions. We tried to address some of these questions with an accent on methods of revealing evolutionary factors based on the analysis of gene exon-intron structures using statistical analysis. Taking whole genomes of fungi, we went through all the protein-coding genes in each chromosome separately and calculated the portion of introncontaining genes and average values of the net length of all the exons in a gene, the number of the exons, and the average length of an exon. We found striking similarities between all of these average properties of chromosomes of the same species and significant differences between properties of the chromosomes belonging to species of different divisions (Phyla) of the kingdom of Fungi. Comparing those chromosomal and genomic averages, we have developed a technique of clustering based on characteristics of the exon-intron structure. This technique of clustering separates different fungi species, grouping them according to Fungi taxonomy. The main conclusion of this article is that the statistical properties of exonintron organizations of genes are the genome-specific features preserved by evolutionary processes.