Genome-wide activation of latent donor splice sites in stress and disease.

ABSTRACT: Sequences that conform to the 5' splice site (5'SS) consensus are highly abundant in mammalian introns. Most of these sequences are preceded by at least one in-frame stop codon; thus, their use for splicing would result in pre-maturely terminated aberrant mRNAs. In normally grown cells, such intronic 5'SSs appear not to be selected for splicing. However, under heat shock conditions aberrant splicing involving such latent 5'SSs occurred in a number of specific gene transcripts. Using a splicing-sensitive microarray, we show here that stress-induced (e.g. heat shock) activation of latent splicing is widespread across the human transcriptome, thus highlighting the possibility that latent splicing may underlie certain diseases. Consistent with this notion, our analyses of data from the Gene Ex

SUBMITTER: Nevo Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3510495 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature