Surprisingly high number of Twintrons in vertebrates

Twintrons represent a special intronic arrangement in which introns of two different types occupy the same gene position. Consequently, alternative splicing of these introns requires two different spliceosomes competing for the same RNA molecule. So far, only two twintrons have been described in insects. Surprisingly, we discovered several such arrangements in vertebrate genomes, which are quite conserved throughout the lineages. Reviewers This article was reviewed by Fyodor Kondrashow and Eugene Koonin.