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Piecing together the significance of splicing

Nature Biotechnology volume 19, page 196 (2001)Cite this article

Alternative splicing increases protein diversity by allowing multiple, sometimes functionally distinct, proteins to be encoded by the same gene. It can be specific to tissues, stress conditions, and developmental and pathological states. In many cases, it serves as an on/off regulation mechanism by introducing a premature stop codon1. We still do not understand how alternative splicing is regulated, but the following fact is now quite clear: in metazoans, it happens very often.

Computational analysis of expressed sequences can teach us a great deal about alternative splicing, because aligning expressed sequences of different splice variants of the same gene usually results in a typical gapped pattern of alignment. The recent information explosion in nucleotide databases gives us the possibility of analysis at the transcriptome (the set of messenger RNAs) level. We can take the entire human expressed sequence tags (ESTs) database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/dbEST/) (currently containing more than 3.1 million ESTs), together with the known complementary DNAs and genomic sequence data, and cluster them by alignment overlaps.

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  1. Rotem Sotek and Mor Amitai: Rotem Sorek is a scientist and Mor Amitai is the president and chief executive officer

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  1. Compugen, 72 Pinchas Rosen St., Tel-Aviv, 69512, Israel

    Rotem Sorek & Mor Amitai

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  1. Rotem Sorek
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  2. Mor Amitai
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Sorek, R., Amitai, M. Piecing together the significance of splicing. Nat Biotechnol 19, 196 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/85613

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