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Distinguished Research Fellow Jun-Yi Leu and Assistant Research Fellow Chien-Ling Lin of the Institute of Molecular Biology led a research team integrating symbiotic evolution and RNA molecular biology to investigate how the ciliate Paramecium bursaria adapts to life with intracellular green algal symbionts through RNA splicing. RNA splicing is the process by which cells remove non-coding segments (introns) from transcribed RNA and join together the coding regions to produce functional messages. Notably, P. bursaria possesses exceptionally short introns, making it an ideal model for studying splicing and intron evolution.

The study found that under symbiotic conditions, alternative splicing patterns of genes involved in nutrient transport are altered, indicating that splicing serves not only as a processing step but also as a regulatory mechanism that helps the host adapt to symbiotic living. Furthermore, these short introns exhibit specific sequence features that enhance splicing efficiency, suggesting that evolution can optimize gene architecture to improve organismal fitness in specialized environments.

This research was supported by the Academia Sinica Grand Challenge Program Seed Grant. The leading author of this study is Thi Ngan Giang Nguyen, a graduate of the Master’s Program in Genome and Systems Biology jointly organized by National Taiwan University and the Institute of Molecular Biology. This study was published in Nucleic Acids Research on February 2, 2026.