One of the most long-standing, fundamental mysteries of biology surrounds the poorly understood origins of introns. Introns are segments of noncoding DNA that must be removed from the genetic code before it is translated in the process of making proteins. Introns are an ancient feature found across all eukaryotic life, a wide range of organisms that spans all animals, plants, fungi, and protists, but are absent in prokaryotic genomes such as those of bacteria. There is a massive variation in the number of introns found in different species’ genomes, even between closely related species.
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Source: Phys.org