Alternative Polyadenylation of Mammalian Transcripts Is Generally Deleterious, Not Adaptive.

ABSTRACT: Alternative polyadenylation (APA) produces from the same gene multiple mature RNAs with varying 3' ends. Although APA is commonly believed to generate beneficial functional diversity and be adaptive, we hypothesize that most genes have one optimal polyadenylation site and that APA is caused largely by deleterious polyadenylation errors. The error hypothesis, but not the adaptive hypothesis, predicts that, as the expression level of a gene increases, its polyadenylation diversity declines, relative use of the major (presumably optimal) polyadenylation site increases, and that of each minor (presumably nonoptimal) site decreases. It further predicts that the number of polyadenylation signals per gene is smaller than the random expectation and that polyadenylation signals for major but not mi

SUBMITTER: Xu C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6420822 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature