The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is unique among model animals in that many of its genes are cotranscribed as polycistronic pre-mRNAs from operons. The mechanism by which these operonic transcripts are resolved into mature mRNAs includes trans-splicing to a family of SL2-like spliced leader exons. SL2-like spliced leaders are distinct from SL1, the major spliced leader in C. elegans and othe...

Nicotinamide mononucleotide adenylyltransferase (NMNAT) is a conserved enzyme in the NAD synthetic pathway. It has also been identified as an effective and versatile neuroprotective factor. However, it remains unclear how healthy neurons regulate the dual functions of NMNAT and achieve self-protection under stress. Here we show that Drosophila Nmnat (DmNmnat) is alternatively spliced into two m...

Description The gene contains five exons and four introns; it is composed of a variable 5' untranslated region, a 296 bp coding sequence, a 3' untranslated region and a polyA tail. Transcription The gene has 5 alternatively spliced variants encoding the same protein; the variant 1 represents the longest transcript (951 bp), all the other variants have distinct and shorter 5'UTR as compared to v...

BACKGROUND In cardiac hypertrophy and failure, there is a widespread alteration in mRNA splicing, but the role of splice variants in cardiac hypertrophy has not yet been fully elucidated. In this study, we used an exon array to identify novel splice variants associated with cardiac hypertrophy. METHODS AND RESULTS We performed genome-wide exon array analysis and developed a splicing profile i...

BACKGROUND Alternative pre-mRNA splicing (AS) plays a central role in generating complex proteomes and influences development and disease. However, the regulation and etiology of AS in human tumorigenesis is not well understood. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS A Basic Local Alignment Search Tool database was constructed for the expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from all available databases of hum...

Sex-determination mechanisms differ among organisms. The primary mechanism is diverse, whereas the terminal regulator is relatively-conserved. We analyzed the transcripts of the Bombyx mori doublesex gene (Bmdsx), and reported novel results concerning the genomic organization and expression of Bmdsx. Bmdsx consists of nine exons and eight introns, of which two exons are novel and have not been ...

Producing spliced EST sequences is a fundamental task in the computational problem of reconstructing splice and transcript variants, a crucial step in the alternative splicing investigation. Now, given an EST sequence, there can be several spliced EST sequences associated to it, since the original EST sequences may have different alignments against wide genomic regions. In this paper we address...

A database of alternatively spliced genes (ASDB) has been constructed based on (i) the results of the analysis of Swiss-Prot entries containing products of these genes and (ii) clustering procedure joining proteins that could arise by alternative splicing of the same gene. ASDB incorporates information about alternatively spliced genes, their products and expression patterns. It can be searched...