Walter Gilbert

We are interested in the evolution of the intron/exon structure of genes. Are the introns ancient structures, used to assemble the first genes from a billion years ago or are they more recent acquisitions, used for exon shuffling in recently evolved proteins? Our work ranges from theoretical estimates for the size of the Universe of exons and theoretical arguments that the introns are very old to cloning and sequencing experiments studying the exon distribution in ancient genes and to population biology experiments, studying the variation of DNA sequences in the population.