Baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is one of the best studied eukaryotes. Its genome is just slightly larger than the largest bacterial genome and it was the first eukaryotic genome to be sequenced (Mewes at al., 1997). It has about 7000 genes in total and 6,604 of these genes are protein-coding genes but only 280 of these genes contain introns.1 The rest have lost their introns over the course of several hundred million years of evolution (Hooks et al., 2014).
We know that introns have been lost in yeast because the genes of related species have lots of introns. The common ancestor of all fungi undoubtedly had genes with multiple introns because the available evidence indicates that introns invaded eukarotic genes very early in the evolution of eukaryotes. The fact that most introns have been purged from the yeast genome suggests that introns are not essential for gene function. In other words, introns are mostly junk.2
The Canadian Broadcastng Company (CBC) has a TV show called Marketplace that promotes itself as an advocate of consumers' rights. It has a history of testing the claims of advertisers and usually shows that these claims are misleading or false. Here's what they say on their website.
On air since 1972, Marketplace is Canada’s consumer watchdog. We get the goods to help you shop smarter and protect yourself from slick scams and misleading marketing claims. We investigate the products and services we all use every day and push companies and government for answers. And we expose the truth on stories that matter to you and your family.
Blogging was light last year because I was busy with other things and because the popularity of blogs is declining rapidly. The most popular post, based on the number of views, garnered only 9229 views, which is more than the most popular post of 2017 but only half as much as the most popular post of 2016. The post with the most comments (53) has almost 10X fewer comments than posts from a few years ago but that's partly because more people are commenting on Facebook and because I'm restricting blog comments in various ways.
