The (In)dependence of Alternative Splicing and Gene Duplication
Figure 6
The Size Distribution of Insertions/Deletions in AS and GD
All analyses of indels have been made for gene families with both AS and GD (i.e., AS+/GD+).
(A) AS indels are longer than GD indels. Indels for GD were obtained from the alignments of GD families at 40% (dark red) and 80% (light violet) seq.id. Information on AS indels (green) was obtained from the SwissProt record of the corresponding protein. Indel size distributions for both GD40 and GD80 are very similar, with most of the indels being shorter than five residues. In contrast, many AS indels are longer than 100 residues.
(B,C) Size distribution for external and internal indels in AS and GD. External indels (B) lie at the N- or C-terminal ends of the protein; internal indels (C) lie in the middle. AS and GD40 indel sizes are different depending on the position of the indels in the sequence. While AS indels are generally larger than GD indels (also see Figure 6A), external indels (B) are larger than internal ones (C), both for AS and GD. The shift in indel sizes implies that large indels (as often introduced by AS) are better-tolerated at the N- and C-termini of proteins, where they are less likely to induce important structural changes.