In: Biology
exon shuffling occurred during the evolution of the eukaryotes genome and explains why many proteins shows evidence of a mosaic history? describe limitations to this
Ans . Exon shuffling is a molecular mechanism for the formation of new genes. It is a process through which two or more exons from different genes can be brought together ectopically, or the same exon can be duplicated , to create a new exon - intron structure .There are different mechanisms through which exon shuffling occurs : transposon mediated exon shuffling, crossover during sexual recombination of parental genomes etc.
The recombination within introns could help assort exons independently and that repetitive segments in the middle of introns could create hotspots for recombination to shuffle the exonic sequences.
The eukaryotic exon-intron structure is not static , introns are continually inserted and removed from genes and the evolution of introns evolves parallel to exon shuffling.
In order for exon shuffling to start to play a major role in protein evolution the appearance of spliceosomal introns had to take place. This was due to the fact that the self-splicing introns of the RNA world were unsuitable for exon shuffling by intronic recombination.