Assessment of orthologous splicing isoforms in human and mouse orthologous genes.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Recent discoveries have highlighted the fact that alternative splicing and alternative transcripts are the rule, rather than the exception, in metazoan genes. Since multiple transcript and protein variants expressed by the same gene are, by definition, structurally distinct and need not to be functionally equivalent, the concept of gene orthology should be extended to the transcript level in order to describe evolutionary relationships between structurally similar transcript variants. In other words, the identification of true orthology relationships between gene products now should progress beyond primary sequence and "splicing orthology", consisting in ancestrally shared exon-intron structures, is required to define orthologous isoforms at transcript level.

Results<

SUBMITTER: Zambelli F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3091683 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature