Searching for Alternatively Splicing Group II Introns.

Poster (download)

Nikolay Kobalo¹, Igor Titov², Alexander Kulikov³, Denis Vorobyev⁴
¹The Laboratory of Computational Problems of Geophysics The Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics Novosibirsk, Russia, rerf2010rerf@yandex.ru
²The Laboratory of Molecular-Genetics Systems The Federal Research Center Institute of Cytology and Genetics Novosibirsk, Russia, titov@bionet.nsc.ru
³The Laboratory of Computational Problems of Geophysics The Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics Novosibirsk, Russia, kulikovai12@gmail.com
⁴INSERM U981 Gustave Roussy Cancer Center Villejuif, France, titov@bionet.nsc.ru

Group II introns are mobile elements present in bacteria, as well as in the eukaryotic organelles. This type of intron is probably the ancestor of nuclear introns. Group II introns have a conservative secondary structure, which determines their ability to self-splice.
It is known that some group II introns have the ability to alternative splicing [1]. The possibility of alternative splicing of group II introns is explained by the fact that they can have several different variants of the secondary structure, each of which leads to its own splicing reaction.
Based on the introns of group II with the secondary structure described in the literature, we have constructed a generalized model of the structure of introns of this type. In addition, we searched for introns corresponding to our model in the RFAM database and found introns with the possibility of alternative splicing. For the found introns, we performed an analysis of coadaptive nucleotide substitutions in the secondary structure. We also analyzed the effect of alternative splicing on proteins that are the product of the corresponding genes.