Abstract
Article and publication date are at http://www.rnajournal.org/cgi/doi/10.1261/rna.050484.115. Freely available online through the RNA Open Access option. 1It turned out, from work by Marlene Belfort and others, that the reason T4 has these group I introns is that it can't get rid of them. Many group I introns are mobile elements, encoding “homing” DNA endonucleases that catalyze an efficient directed gene conversion. For introns with active homing endonucleases, mixed infections of intron-plus and intron-minus phage are converted to almost all intron-plus progeny. Nonetheless, the striking and unexplained preference of group I introns for certain host genes continues to follow the Gold/Shub idea. For example, in 1990, the B. subtilis phage SPO1 was found to have a group I intron in its DNA polymerase gene. In 1996, the third T4 intron-containing gene, sunY, was found to encode the T4 anaerobic ribonucleotide reductase, and has now been renamed nrdD.
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