Lecture 19 Flashcards
What are introns?
Non-coding regions
What are exons?
Coding regions
Are introns or exons transcribed into pre-mRNA?
Both
How to form mature mRNA?
Need to splice: Introns are excised and exons are covalently linked to form mature mRNA
What procedure first detected splicing?
R-looping
What happened during R-looping?
- ssDNA was hybridized to its corresponding mRNA and imaged to electron microscopy
- large loops of DNA observed that didn’t anneal
- these loops encode introns that are excised out of the pre-mRNA to make the mRNA molecule
What two ways to detect splicing?
- R-looping
- Comparing sequence of a gene to that of its corresponding complementary DNA (cDNA), which is synthesized from the mRNA. Introns in the gene are present in the ssDNA template strand but have been excised from the processed mRNA
Typically DNA has more introns or exons
Introns
What are the three types of introns?
Spliceosome “spliceosomal” introns, Group I introns, Group II introns
What are spliceosome “spliceosomal” introns
- The largest class of introns, inc those found in nuclear mRNA primary transcripts
- non-self-splicing introns
What are Group I introns
- Found in some nuclear, mitochondrial and chloroplast genes encoding for rRNAs, mRNA and tRNAs
- self-splicing
What are group II introns
- found among rare examples of introns in bacteria
- self-splicing
What is used to remove spliceosome introns from mRNA
- use a large RNA-protein complex called a spliceosome to catalyze splicing
How do self-splicing introns differ from spliceosomal introns?
- have very specific RNA sequences that catalyze their own excision and joining
What are catalytic RNA molecules are called
ribozymes
In eukaryotes, spliceosome introns have what common motif?
The intron begins with GU and ends with AG
In spliceosome introns: What is the consensus sequence at the 5’ splice site in vertebrates?
AG/GUAAGU
In spliceosome introns: What is the consensus sequence at the 3’ splice site?
a stretch of 10 pyrimidines, (Py)n, U or C, followed by any base (N) and then often by C, and always ending with AG
In spliceosome introns: Where is the branch site
20-50 nt upstream of (i.e., 5’ to) the 3’ splice site
In spliceosome introns: What is always located at the branch site
An adenosine
In spliceosome introns: What are the conserved residues critical for spliceosome-mediated splicing
- 5’ splice site AGGUAAGU
- 3’ splice site AG
- Branch site A
What happens during the first trans-esterfication reaction in splicing?
The 2-OH of branch site A
nucleophilically attacks the 5’ phosphate of the 1st nucleotide of the intron. This cleaves the
phosphodiester bond between the intron and the upstream exon and forms a new 2’-5’ phosphodiester
bond between A and the intron