| Abstract | This chapter provides a general description of introns in Drosophila genes, withemphasis on the genetic information responsible for the correct specification of
boundaries between introns and exons. The problem of locating introns within
unannotated DNA sequences is posed by any large genomic sequencing project,
and provides a perspective for discussing the information that specifies their
removal. I want to stress, however, that there may not be a single set of rules
that can identify all introns in all tissues. Certainly, it has become clear that
the rules for locating introns will differ between species, such as flies and
humans, in different taxonomic classes. Here, I will attempt to describe in
general terms both what is known about how introns are recognized by the
splicing machinery, and how an investigator might go about identifying introns
within the sequence of his favorite Drosophila gene. Ultimately, such searches
will be carried out by computer. Most current software, however, is designed
specifically or primarily for species other than Drosophila (one exception is the
program GM (Fields and Soderlund 1990), which accepts organism-specific
consensus matrices and codon asymmetry tables). I am currently developing
computational applications of the ideas described here, and interested readers
are encouraged to consult current releases of the electronic Drosophila Infor-
mation Newsletter.
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