Exon

An exon is any part of a gene that will become a part of the final mature RNA produced by that gene after introns have been removed by RNA splicing. The term exon refers to both the DNA sequence within a gene and to the corresponding sequence in RNA transcripts. In RNA splicing, introns are removed and exons are covalently joined to one another as part of generating the mature messenger RNA.

History

The term exon derives from the expressed region and was coined by American biochemist Walter Gilbert in 1978: "The notion of the cistron… must be replaced by that of a transcription unit containing regions which will be lost from the mature messenger – which I suggest we call introns (for intragenic regions) – alternating with regions which will be expressed – exons."

This definition was originally made for protein-coding transcripts that are spliced before being translated. The term later came to include sequences removed from rRNA and tRNA, and it also was used later for RNA molecules originating from different parts of the genome that are then ligated by trans-splicing.