All eukaryotes — that is, multi-celled organisms — have genomes that contain seemingly unimportant intervening sequences, or “introns,” between the encoding “exons.” The RNA from these introns has to be spliced out to reconstruct the directions to make important proteins.
Why our cells contain introns, and why the amount of introns varies widely between species has been a long-standing mystery, but a recent study of genetic elements called introners out of UC Santa Cruz “might explain the vast majority of intron gain,” according to Russ Corbett-Detig, senior author of the new paper and an affiliate of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute.
Read Quanta Magazine’s coverage of the research.