Eukaryotic mRNA Intron/Exon Boundary Consensus Sequences?

[Andy Law]

Jared,

In article <50til3$6v8 at nntp3.u.washington.edu>, roach at u.washington.edu
(Jared Roach) wrote:

 >          Can anyone point me to a good reference?
 >  
 >  All I know is that functional introns usually begin with GT 
 >  and end with AG.  Are there known exceptions?  How rare are 
 >  they?  In short, given a random intron, what is the probability 
 >  distribution for the composition of its first and last two 
 >  base pairs? 

Try the following as a starting point. Use ENTREZ to look them up and find
related papers. There are probably more up-to-date references available.



Jackson, I.J. (1991) A reappraisal of non-consensus mRNA splice sites.
Nucleic Acids Research 19, 3795-3798. 

Mount, S.M. (1982) A catalogue of splice junction sequences. Nucleic Acids
Research 10, 459-472. 

Ohshima, Y. & Gotoh, Y. (1987) Signals for the selection of a splice site
in pre-mRNA: Computer anaysis of splice junction sequences and like
sequences. Journal of Molecular Biology 195, 247-259. 

Shapiro, M.B. & Senapathy, P. (1987) RNA splice junctions of different
classes of eukaryotes: Sequence statistics and functional implications in
gene expression. Nucleic Acids Research 15, 7155-7174. 


 >  
 >  Thanks,  Jared
 >  
 >  EXTRA BONUS QUESTION:  Does this probability distribution 
 >  depend on the species?
 >  
 >  

Yes.

Andy Law
------------------
( Andy.Law at bbsrc.ac.uk )
( Big Nose in Edinburgh )