It has been recently determined that the gene for duchenne muscular dystrophy (dmd) is more than 2000 kb (kilobases) in length; however, the mrna produced by this gene is only about 14 kb long. what is a likely cause of this discrepancy

The likely cause of this discrepancy is the introns have been sliced out during mRNA processing.

In most organisms, the coding regions (exons) are interrupted by the non-coding regions (introns). During transcription, the entire gene is copied into the pre-mRNA, which includes exons and introns. During the process of RNA splicing or processing, the introns are removed and exons joined to form a contiguous coding sequence.