A general definition and nomenclature for alternative splicing events.

TitleA general definition and nomenclature for alternative splicing events.
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2008
AuthorsSammeth, M, Foissac, S, Guigó, R
JournalPLoS Comput Biol
Volume4
Issue8
Paginatione1000147
Date Published2008 Aug 08
ISSN1553-7358
KeywordsAlternative Splicing, Animals, Bees, Caenorhabditis elegans, Cattle, Chickens, Cluster Analysis, Databases, Genetic, Dogs, Drosophila melanogaster, Gene Expression Profiling, Genomics, Humans, Mice, Pan troglodytes, Rats, RNA Splice Sites, Sequence Analysis, RNA, Software, Species Specificity, Terminology as Topic, Xenopus, Zebrafish
Abstract

Understanding the molecular mechanisms responsible for the regulation of the transcriptome present in eukaryotic cells is one of the most challenging tasks in the postgenomic era. In this regard, alternative splicing (AS) is a key phenomenon contributing to the production of different mature transcripts from the same primary RNA sequence. As a plethora of different transcript forms is available in databases, a first step to uncover the biology that drives AS is to identify the different types of reflected splicing variation. In this work, we present a general definition of the AS event along with a notation system that involves the relative positions of the splice sites. This nomenclature univocally and dynamically assigns a specific "AS code" to every possible pattern of splicing variation. On the basis of this definition and the corresponding codes, we have developed a computational tool (AStalavista) that automatically characterizes the complete landscape of AS events in a given transcript annotation of a genome, thus providing a platform to investigate the transcriptome diversity across genes, chromosomes, and species. Our analysis reveals that a substantial part--in human more than a quarter-of the observed splicing variations are ignored in common classification pipelines. We have used AStalavista to investigate and to compare the AS landscape of different reference annotation sets in human and in other metazoan species and found that proportions of AS events change substantially depending on the annotation protocol, species-specific attributes, and coding constraints acting on the transcripts. The AStalavista system therefore provides a general framework to conduct specific studies investigating the occurrence, impact, and regulation of AS.

DOI10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000147
Alternate JournalPLoS Comput. Biol.
PubMed ID18688268
PubMed Central IDPMC2467475