Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access published online on April 22, 2007
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkm187
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Computational Biology |
Non-EST-based prediction of novel alternatively spliced cassette exons with cell signaling function in Caenorhabditis elegans and human
Department of Genetics and Center for Genome Sciences, Washington University in St Louis, 4444 Forest Park Parkway, Campus Box 8510, St Louis, MO 63108, USA
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +1-314-362-2751; Fax: +1-314-362-2156; Email: rmitra{at}genetics.wustl.edu
Received January 3, 2007. Revised March 15, 2007. Accepted March 16, 2007.
To better understand the complex role that alternative splicing plays in intracellular signaling, it is important to catalog the numerous splice variants involved in signal transduction. Therefore, we developed PASE (Prediction of Alternative Signaling Exons), a computational tool to identify novel alternative cassette exons that code for kinase phosphorylation or signaling protein-binding sites. We first applied PASE to the Caenorhabditis elegans genome. In this organism, our algorithm had an overall specificity of 
76.4%, including 33 novel cassette exons that we experimentally verified. We then used PASE to analyze the human genome and made 804 predictions, of which 308 were found as alternative exons in the transcript database. We experimentally tested 384 of the remaining unobserved predictions and discovered 26 novel human exons for a total specificity of 41.5% in human. By using a test set of known alternatively spliced signaling exons, we determined that the sensitivity of PASE is 
70%. GO term analysis revealed that our exon predictions were found in the introns of known signal transduction genes more often than expected by chance, indicating PASE enriches for splice variants that function in signaling pathways. Overall, PASE was able to uncover 59 novel alternative cassette exons in C. elegans and humans through a genome-wide ab initio prediction method that enriches for exons involved in signaling.
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  G. G. Leparc and R. D. Mitra A sensitive procedure to detect alternatively spliced mRNA in pooled-tissue samples Nucleic Acids Res., December 18, 2007; 35(21): e146 - e146. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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