When analyzing the distribution of introns in each species, we found that orthologs, regardless of species, are more likely to harbor introns compared to the genome as a whole (figure 2).
The authors showed that RP-sites are 20-times more abundant in large Drosophila introns compared to their complementary strands as well as compared to their short introns.
miRNA-containing host genes were three times longer, contained more introns and had longer 5' introns compared to a randomly sampled gene cohort.
It is known from recent papers [ 33, 34], that Y linked genes contain more repetitive elements in their introns compared to X alleles.
Because SNPs were only 1.8 times more located in intergenic regions and introns compared with coding regions, we conclude that point mutations are more frequent in coding DNA than indels leading to frame shifts immediately.
Finally, Oenothera flava (the only Oenothera species in this study to have introns) shows more variability in exons than in introns compared to Eucalyptus (0.26 and 0.18, respectively), although the difference is less striking for this taxon.
We found that potential microsatellite regions were 4.7 times more located in intergenic regions and introns compared with coding regions.
In addition we see that the advantage of having a TATA core promoter for expression is more significant for genes bearing short introns compared to genes with long introns.
For example, in contrast to coding sequences, the more stable rAA/dTT pair is under-represented in introns compared to its corresponding but less stable rUU/dAA pair.
The enlarged mt genomes contained ∼40% introns compared to 8.1% in uninvaded relatives.
