intron

For starters, the patentability of a gene now depends on whether or not there's an intron in that gene?

The role scientists then subsequently play is to take the messenger RNA and use it to synthesize the intron-free cDNA.

Direct sequencing is NOT covered by the myriad patent; and genechips use such short DNA sequences that the 'intron' exception doesn't hold.

Does the host species accidentally transcribe the intron segments into new introners until it evolves a mechanism to avoid that particular trick?

Further, faulty viruses can acquire oncogenes (intron-splicted, mtuated versions of growth factors, like EGF and HER2/neu) and transfer them to other cells via cDNA intermediates.

I may be misinterpreting what you said but it seems as though you consider 'start' 'stop' 'intron' 'exon' 'suppress' as properties of transcription factors.

> determinant of whether an intron would be spliced out of the mRNA transcript.

Introns are important, especially intron boundaries.

My interest was more in the similarity between the C preprocessor and intron splicing, and even dabbled with the similarity between the ribosome and the compiler (except, the ribosome is simultaneously far simpler than a compiler, yet infinitely richer in complexity).

Thanks, I've fixed the mistake s/exon/intron/.

Between epigenetics and embryology, we know that the whole intron/exon dichotomy is fatally flawed and evolutionary genetics has long turned to more complex methods to trace relationships, which are very nonlinear even in our near family tree.

That’s what I thought too until I learned about - the dna that doesn’t code for proteins but makes up the vast majority of human dna - the intron regions of genes that are translated into RNA but then sliced out of the RNA and not transcribed into protein and are 5x larger than the coding parts Those two things alone are absolutely critical to understand to interpret a genome sequence.

If intron removal is one of the key steps, and intron removal occurs naturally in the cell before the process of cell harvesting and cDNA creation begins, it is confusing (to me) to say that cDNA creation is a patent-worthy "creation".

We will eventually identify a better classification than "intron" and "exon" to sort through the "junk" from "critical junk" but we are really only starting to untangle the situation.

Other than "start," "stop," "intron," "exon," and "suppress" (aka disable), what do the transcription factors do in terms of actual cell proteins?

(Among other things, it suggests that the nucleus itself developed because of the inflow of bacterial DNA and the need to parse out meaningless intron segments of genetic code.) Note also that the subsequent endosymbiotic absorption of chloroplasts is not a "common" event, although of course it is very important-- at least to us, as we wouldn't be here without it.