The fitness cost of mis-splicing is the main determinant of alternative splicing patterns.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Most eukaryotic genes are subject to alternative splicing (AS), which may contribute to the production of protein variants or to the regulation of gene expression via nonsense-mediated messenger RNA (mRNA) decay (NMD). However, a fraction of splice variants might correspond to spurious transcripts and the question of the relative proportion of splicing errors to functional splice variants remains highly debated.

Results

We propose a test to quantify the fraction of AS events corresponding to errors. This test is based on the fact that the fitness cost of splicing errors increases with the number of introns in a gene and with expression level. We analyzed the transcriptome of the intron-rich eukaryote Paramecium tetraurelia. We show that in both normal and in NMD-d

SUBMITTER: Saudemont B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5663052 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature