Question

Gene identification in prokaryotic organisms is simplified by their lacking _________

(a) exons

(b) introns

(c) coding segments

(d) useful nucleotide sequences

I had been asked this question by my school teacher while I was bunking the class.

Question is taken from Sequence Assembly and Gene Identification topic in division Collecting & Storing Sequences in Laboratory of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

The correct choice is (b) introns

To explain I would say: Once the sequence patterns that are characteristic of the genes in a particular prokaryotic organism (e.g, codon usage, codon neighbor preference) have been found, gene locations in the genome sequence can be predicted quite accurately. The presence of introns in eukaryotic genomes makes gene prediction more involved because, in addition to the above features, locations of intron–exon and exon–intron splice junctions must also be predicted.