Vladimir N. Babenko

TL;DR: It was shown that introns indeed predominantly insert into or are fixed in specific protosplice sites which have the consensus sequence (A/C)AG|Gt, and are compatible with the hypothesis that the original, catastrophic intron invasion accompanied the emergence of the eukaryotic cells.

TL;DR: Dating gene duplications and the associated intron gains and losses based on the molecular clock assumption showed that very few, if any, introns were gained during the last approximately 100 million years of animal and plant evolution, in agreement with previous conclusions reached through analysis of orthologous gene sets.

TL;DR: This work shows that in 5′-untranslated regions of mammalian cDNAs but not in 3′-UTRs or coding sequences, AUG is conserved to a significantly greater extent than any of the other 63 nt triplets, and finds that open reading frames starting from conserved AUGs are significantly shorter than those starting from non-conserved uAUGs, possibly owing to selection for optimization of the level of attenuation.

TL;DR: It is shown that protosplice sites are no more conserved during evolution of eukaryotic gene sequences than random sites, and the presence of numerous introns in the same positions in orthologous genes from distant eUKaryotes appears to reflect mostly bona fide evolutionary conservation.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that AUGs are conserved to a significantly greater extent than any of the other 63 nt triplets in mammalian cDNAs, which is likely due to bona fide evolutionary conservation, rather than cDNA annotation artifacts.