Until recently, it appeared that archaeal introns were spliced by a pr
ocess specific to the archaeal domain in which an endoribonuclease cut
s a 'bulge-helix-bulge' motif that forms at exon-intron junctions. Rec
ent results, however, have shown that the endoribonuclease involved in
archaeal intron splicing is a homologue of two subunits of the enzyme
complex that excises eukaryotic nuclear tRNA introns. Moreover, some
archaeal introns encode homing enzymes that are also encoded by group
I introns.