I have two jobs right now. One of them is an internship working on introns.
Introns are part of your genes, but they’re a strange part.
Imagine your genes are like a TV show. There are parts you watch and there are the commercials that you mute or ignore.
When the TV show comes out on DVD or Netflix the commercials are removed.
Genes are split up into watchable parts and commercials too. The watchable parts are called exons and the commercials are called introns.
When DNA makes RNA the introns are removed from the code, just like when a TV show is released on DVD the commercials are removed.
For a while scientists thought that introns did nothing for the genetic code of an organism. Introns were just useless DNA trash.
That changed in the late 1980s when some introns were found to enhance the expression of genes.
Some genes have what are called enhancing introns that increase the expression of that gene. This is called intron mediated enhancement (IME).
If you take an enhancing intron from one gene and put it into another, then the other gene will create more RNA and thus more proteins as well.
So enhancing introns increase expression of a gene, but not much is known about why. The lab I work in is one of the few that studies this process to try and figure out the specifics.
Most intron research right now is done in plants. I’m trying to extend that research to animals by using worms.
The worms I use are called C. elegans. They’re only 1mm long and are commonly used for research projects around the globe.
My lab previously discovered that enhancing introns in plants work best near the beginning of a gene.
My project is to see if the same holds true for C. elegans.
I’ll also be looking at whether an intron that is enhancing in plants is also enhancing when out into a gene in C. elegans.
That’s all for now!
-Mister Ed
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