Correcting for differential transcript coverage reveals a strong relationship between alternative splicing and organism complexity.

ABSTRACT: What at the genomic level underlies organism complexity? Although several genomic features have been associated with organism complexity, in the case of alternative splicing, which has long been proposed to explain the variation in complexity, no such link has been established. Here, we analyzed over 39 million expressed sequence tags available for 47 eukaryotic species with fully sequenced genomes to obtain a comparable index of alternative splicing estimates, which corrects for the distorting effect of a variable number of transcripts per species--an important obstacle for comparative studies of alternative splicing. We find that alternative splicing has steadily increased over the last 1,400 My of eukaryotic evolution and is strongly associated with organism complexity, assayed as the n

SUBMITTER: Chen L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4032128 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature