Prevalence and distribution of introns in non-ribosomal protein genes of yeast

Relatively few genes in the yeast Saccharornyces cerevisiae are known to contain intervening sequences. As a group, yeast ribosomal protein genes exhibit a higher prevalence of introns when compared to non-ribosomal protein genes. In an effort to quantify this bias we have estimated the prevalence of intron sequences among non-ribosomal protein genes by assessing the number of prp2-sensitive mRNAs in an in vitro translation assay. These results, combined with an updated survey of the GenBank DNA database, support an estimate of 2.5% for intron-containing non-ribosomal protein genes. Furthermore, our observations reveal an intriguing distinction between the distributions of ribosomal protein and non-ribosomal protein intron lengths, suggestive of distinct, gene class-specific evolutionary pressures.