Benoit Cousineau, McGill University
Associate Professor
Microbiology and Immunology
Montreal, Quebec
benoit.cousineau@mcgill.ca
Office:
(514) 398-8882
Expert In
Bio/Research
The main topic of study of our laboratory is group II introns. Group II introns are ribozymes. They splice autocatalytically from their pre-mRNA transcript by two consecutive transesterification reactions. This process is identical to the splicing of nuclear introns and functions to ligate the fl...
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Bio/Research
The main topic of study of our laboratory is group II introns. Group II introns are ribozymes. They splice autocatalytically from their pre-mRNA transcript by two consecutive transesterification reactions. This process is identical to the splicing of nuclear introns and functions to ligate the flanking exons and release the intron in the form of a lariat. Some group II introns contain open reading frames (ORFs) and are also mobile retroelements. Group II introns are found in bacteria, archaea and bacterial-derived organelles. Very little sequence similarity is observed amongst group II introns; however, their secondary structure is highly conserved. It consists of six domains (DI-DVI) that radiate from a central hub (Belfort et al., 2001).
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