A decades-long journey with mobile introns
- Department of Biological Sciences and RNA Institute, State University of New York, Albany, New York 12222, USA
- Corresponding author: mbelfort{at}albany.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Our discovery of introns in phage over 30 years ago propelled me into the RNA arena. That was 10 years before the journal RNA was launched and 70 years since the discovery of phage. The year 2015 is therefore one of celebration for me, the 100th anniversary of phage and 20 years of the journal RNA!
Before we published the phage intron story, Frank Stahl and I struck up a conversation at a phage meeting at Cold Spring Harbor. That was after the discovery of the first of three introns in phage T4, when we were wrestling with a finding that went against the dogma of introns residing exclusively in eukaryotes. With an abundance of caution, I called the intervening sequence a “genetic interruption.” Frank said, “Marlene, you must call it an intron before anyone else does.” I took his advice, and shortly after, we showed that the “interruption” …
