Project description:Alternative pre-messenger RNA splicing impacts development, physiology, and disease, but its regulation in humans is not well understood, partially due to the limited scale to which the expression of specific splicing events has been measured. We generated the first genome-scale expression compendium of human alternative splicing events using custom whole-transcript microarrays monitoring expression of 24,426 mutually exclusive alternative splicing event pairs in 48 diverse human samples. Over 11,700 genes and 9,500 splicing events were differentially expressed, providing a rich resource for studying splicing regulation. An unbiased, systematic screen of 21,760 4-mer to 7-mer words for cis-regulatory motifs identified 143 RNA 'words' enriched near regulated cassette exons, including six clusters of motifs represented by UCUCU, UGCAUG, UGCU, UGUGU, UUUU, and AGGG, which map to trans-acting regulators PTB, Fox, Muscleblind, CELF/CUG-BP, TIA-1, and hnRNP F/H, respectively. Each cluster showed a distinct pattern of genomic location and tissue specificity. For example, UCUCU occurs 110 to 35 nucleotides preceding cassette exons upregulated in brain and striated muscle but depleted in other tissues. UCUCU and UGCAUG appear to have similar function but independent action, occurring 5' and 3', respectively, of 33% of the cassette exons upregulated in skeletal muscle but co-occurring for only 2%. Keywords: multiple tissue comparison PolyA+ purified RNA pooled from multiple donors of a single human tissue type (e.g. cerebellum) were amplified with random primers and hybridized on a two-color ink-jet oligonucletodie microarray (17 array set) against a common reference pool, comprising ~20 normal adult tissue pools, on custom microarray patterns containing probes to monitor every exon and exon-exon junction in transcript databases, patent databases, and predicted from mouse transcripts. Data were analyzed for gene expression (the average of multiple probes), exon and junction expression, and splice form proportionality (see paper).
Project description:Alternative pre-messenger RNA splicing impacts development, physiology, and disease, but its regulation in humans is not well understood, partially due to the limited scale to which the expression of specific splicing events has been measured. We generated the first genome-scale expression compendium of human alternative splicing events using custom whole-transcript microarrays monitoring expression of 24,426 mutually exclusive alternative splicing event pairs in 48 diverse human samples. Over 11,700 genes and 9,500 splicing events were differentially expressed, providing a rich resource for studying splicing regulation. An unbiased, systematic screen of 21,760 4-mer to 7-mer words for cis-regulatory motifs identified 143 RNA 'words' enriched near regulated cassette exons, including six clusters of motifs represented by UCUCU, UGCAUG, UGCU, UGUGU, UUUU, and AGGG, which map to trans-acting regulators PTB, Fox, Muscleblind, CELF/CUG-BP, TIA-1, and hnRNP F/H, respectively. Each cluster showed a distinct pattern of genomic location and tissue specificity. For example, UCUCU occurs 110 to 35 nucleotides preceding cassette exons upregulated in brain and striated muscle but depleted in other tissues. UCUCU and UGCAUG appear to have similar function but independent action, occurring 5' and 3', respectively, of 33% of the cassette exons upregulated in skeletal muscle but co-occurring for only 2%. Keywords: multiple tissue comparison
Project description:We used Affymetrix GeneChipM-BM-. Human Exon 1.0 ST Arrays to identify alternative splicing events in 15 samples of PDAC compared to 6 non-tumor samples. Several commercial and open source software approaches for the analysis of differential splicing were tested and a subset of overlapping results was validated using RT-PCR and sequencing. Splicing variants could be validated in several genes closely related to cancer. Pathway analysis of genes predicted to be alternatively spliced revealed an enrichment of genes in categories closely related to cell-cell interactions and kinase activity. 15 samples of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and 6 non tumor pancreatic samples were analyzed for alternative splicing events
Project description:Using a quantitative alternative splicing (AS) microarray platform, we have identified a large number of widely-expressed mouse genes containing single or coordinated-pairs of alternative exons that are spliced in a tissue-regulated fashion. The majority of these AS events display differential regulation in central nervous system (CNS) tissues. Approximately half of the corresponding genes have neural-specific functions and operate in common processes and interconnected pathways. Differential regulation of AS in the CNS tissues correlates strongly with a set of mostly new motifs that are predominantly located in the intron and constitutive exon sequences neighboring CNS-regulated alternative exons. Different subsets of these motifs are correlated with either increased inclusion or increased exclusion of alternative exons in CNS-tissues, relative to the other profiled tissues. Keywords: Alternative splicing
Project description:Establishing the functional roles of genetic variants remains a significant challenge in the post-genomic era. Here, we present a method, allele-specific alternative mRNA processing (ASARP), to identify genetically influenced mRNA processing events using transcriptome sequencing (RNA-Seq) data. The method examines RNA-Seq data at both single nucleotide and whole-gene/isoform levels to identify allele-specific expression (ASE) and existence of allele-specific regulation of mRNA processing. We applied the methods to data obtained from the human glioblastoma cell line U87MG and primary breast cancer tissues and found that 26M-bM-^@M-^S45% of all genes with sufficient read coverage demonstrated ASE, with significant overlap between the two cell types. Our methods predicted potential mechanisms underlying ASE due to regulations affecting either whole-gene-level expression or alternative mRNA processing, including alternative splicing, alternative polyadenylation and alternative transcriptional initiation. Allele-specific alternative splicing and alternative polyadenylation may explain ASE in hundreds of genes in each cell type. Reporter studies following these predictions identified the causal single nucleotide variants (SNVs) for several allele-specific alternative splicing events. Finally, many genes identified in our study were also reported as disease/phenotype-associated genes in genome-wide association studies. Future applications of our approach may provide ample insights for a better understanding of the genetic basis of gene regulation underlying phenotypic diversity and disease mechanisms. Examine allele-specific gene expression and alternative RNA processing in U87MG cell line
Project description:We investigated the cis-regulatory divergences in alternative splicing and their relationship with tissue-dependent trans-regulation in multiple tissues of an F1 hybrid mouse. By obtaining more than 240 million read pairs on average in each sample from 5 organs and ESC as well as published data in liver, we comprehensively analyzed the allelic splicing patterns across tissues in hybrid mice. We find that tissue-dependent regulation causing large splicing differences is highly conserved and likely functional, while splicing divergence mainly affects genes under relaxed selective constraints. Although cis-divergence is in general associated with higher densities of sequence variants in regulatory regions, events with high usage of the dominant isoform could tolerate more mutations, which explains the paradoxical sequence conservation pattern in their exonic versus intronic splicing site flanking regions. Finally, we demonstrated that non-adaptive mutations are often masked in tissues where accurate splicing likely is more important, and experimentally attributed such buffering effect to trans-regulatory splicing efficiency.
Project description:We explored alternative splicing events upon hsa-miR-139-5p/HNRNPF axis regulation in our cell system using the Multivariate Analysis of Transcript Splicing (rMATS) computational tool (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1419161111). Differential analysis of major splicing outcomes (skipped exon, alternative 5’/3’ splice, mutually exclusive exons and retained intron) revealed a total of 174 events significantly activated or repressed (FDR<0.05) upon HNRNPF regulation.
Project description:Alternative splicing generates functional diversity in higher organisms through alternative first and last exons, skipped and included exons, intron retentions and alternative donor and acceptor sites. In large-scale microarray studies in human and mouse, emphasis so far has been placed on exon-skip events, leaving the prevalence and importance of other splice types largely unexplored. Using a new human splice variant database and a genome-wide microarray to probes thousands of splice events of each type, we measured differential expression of splice types across 6 pairs of diverse cell lines and validated the database annotation process. Results suggest that splicing in human is more complex than simple exon skip events, which account for a minority of splicing differences. The relative frequency of differential expression of the splice types correlates with what is found by our annotation efforts. In conclusion, alternative splicing in human cells is considerably more complex than the canonical example of the exon-skip. The complementary approaches of genome-wide annotation of alternative splicing in human and design of genome-wide splicing microarrays to measure differential splicing in biological samples provide a powerful high-throughput tool to study the role of alternative splicing in human biology. Keywords: alternative splicing
Project description:How species with similar repertoires of protein coding genes differ so dramatically at the phenotypic level is poorly understood. From comparing the transcriptomes of multiple organs from vertebrate species spanning ~350 million years of evolution, we observe significant differences in alternative splicing complexity between the main vertebrate lineages, with the highest complexity in the primate lineage. Moreover, within as little as six million years, the splicing profiles of physiologically-equivalent organs have diverged to the extent that they are more strongly related to the identity of a species than they are to organ type. Most vertebrate species-specific splicing patterns are governed by the highly variable use of a largely conserved cis-regulatory code. However, a smaller number of pronounced species-dependent splicing changes are predicted to remodel interactions involving factors acting at multiple steps in gene regulation. These events are expected to further contribute to the dramatic diversification of alternative splicing as well as to other gene regulatory changes that contribute to phenotypic differences among vertebrate species. mRNA profiles of several organs (brain, liver, kidney, heart, skeletal muscle) in multiple vertebrate species (mouse, chicken, lizard, frog, pufferfish) generated by deep sequencing using Illumina HiSeq
Project description:We describe the application of a new microarray platform, which combines information from exon body and splice-junction probes, to analyze the regulation of 3126 alternative splicing events in ten mouse tissues. The details of the methods and algorithms are described in this paper: Revealing global regulatory features of mammalian alternative splicing using a quantitative microarray platform (Molecular Cell, Dec., 2004) Keywords = A new quantitative alternative splicing microarray platform