On Correlation between G+C Contents and Intron Lengths:
Longer Introns Tend to be More A+T Rich
On Correlation between G+C Contents and Intron Lengths:
Longer Introns Tend to be More A+T Rich
Yasuhiro Asakawa [1] (s93011ya@sfc.keio.ac.jp)
Masaru Tomita [2] (mt@sfc.keio.ac.jp)
Laboratory for Bioinformatics
[1] Department of Policy Management
[2] Department of Environment Information
Keio University
5322 Endo, Fujisawa, 252 Japan
Abstract
An interesting correlation between G+C contents and the lengths of
primate introns have been found by our computer analysis.
All sequences of primate introns were extracted from the Genbank
database and classified into subgroups according to their lengths (the
number of bases; increment of 100). G+C contents (%) were then
calculated for each subgroup.
The results indicate that shorter introns tend
to contain more G and C nucleotides, and longer introns contain A
and T nucleotides.
Frequencies of each nucleotide for each subgroup are shown in figure 1.
We also computed G+C contents of exons flanking those introns for each
subgroup. As we can see in figure 2, the similar but weaker
tendencies are observed.
Biological significance of those observations is currently
under investigation. We also intend to extend our analysis
to other eukaryotes.
