INFLUENCE OF EXON DUPLICATION ON INTRON AND EXON PHASE DISTRIBUTION

Nonrandomness in the intron and exon phase distributions in a sample o f 305 human genes has been found and analyzed. It was shown that exon duplications had a significant effect on the exon phase nonrandomness, All of the nonrandomness is probably due to both the processes of exo n duplication and shuffling, A quantitative estimation of exon duplica tions in the human genome and their influence on the intron and exon p hase distributions has been analyzed. According to our estimation, the proportion of duplicated exons in the human genome constitutes at lea st 6% of the total, Generalizing the particular case of exon duplicati on to the more common event of exon shuffling, we modeled and analyzed the influence of exon shuffling on intron phase distribution.