Early origin of canonical introns

Abstract

Spliceosomal introns, one of the hallmarks of eukaryotic genomes, were thought to have originated late in evolution1,2 and were assumed not to exist in eukaryotes that diverged early — until the discovery of a single intron with an aberrant splice boundary in the primitive 'protozoan' Giardia3. Here we describe introns from a close relative of Giardia, Carpediemonas membranifera, that have boundary sequences of the normal eukaryotic type, indicating that canonical introns are likely to have arisen very early in eukaryotic evolution.