structural:scholar_edition
Complexity

Though many genes have simple structures, as with much of biology, others can be quite complex or represent unusual edge-cases. Eukaryotic genes often have introns are often much larger than their exons, and those introns can even have other genes nested inside them. Associated enhancers may be many kilobase away, or even on entirely different chromosomes operating via physical contact between two chromosomes. A single gene can encode multiple different functional products by alternative splicing, and conversely gene may be split across chromosomes but those transcripts are concatenated back together into a functional sequence by trans-splicing. It is also possible for overlapping genes to share some of their DNA sequence, either on opposite strands or the same strand (in a different reading frame, or even the same reading frame).