Discovery of introns
Descubrimiento de los intrones
- Date
- 1977 · confidence high
- Place
- Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cold Spring Harbor, New York, United States
- Credited to
- Richard J. Roberts and Phillip Sharp (independent laboratories)
- Field
- Life & health
What was discovered
Roberts and Sharp independently discovered that eukaryotic genes contain non-coding segments (introns) that are removed from messenger RNA by splicing before translation into protein.
What it led to
- The 1993 Nobel Prize in Medicine
- Understanding of alternative splicing and the complexity of the eukaryotic genome