Group I introns are widespread in archaea

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Abstract

Group I catalytic introns have been found in bacterial, viral, organellar, and some eukaryotic genomes, but not in archaea. All known archaeal introns are bulge-helix-bulge (BHB) introns, with the exception of a few group II introns. It has been proposed that BHB introns arose from extinct group I intron ancestors, much like eukaryotic spliceosomal introns are thought to have descended from group II introns. However, group I introns have little sequence conservation, making them difficult to detect with standard sequence similarity searches. Taking advantage of recent improvements in a computational homology search method that accounts for both conserved sequence and RNA secondary structure, we have identified 39 group I introns in a wide range of archaeal phyla, including examples of group I introns and BHB introns in the same host gene.

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Nawrocki, E. P., Jones, T. A., & Eddy, S. R. (2018). Group I introns are widespread in archaea. Nucleic Acids Research, 46(15), 7970–7976. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gky414

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