CaTCH: Calculating transcript complexity of human genes.

The findings based on whole transcriptome sequencing suggest that alternative splicing occurs in approximately 95% of human multi-exon genes, thus, playing a crucial role in promoting proteome diversity. According to the latest GENCODE annotations, most genes have less than four transcripts, positively correlating with the number of exons. Thus, it is more accurate to measure the splice variant efficiency of a gene with respect to the number of exons, which is a measure of Transcript Complexity (TC).

Inefficient splicing of long non-coding RNAs is associated with higher transcript complexity in human and mouse.

Recent reports show that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have inefficient splicing and fewer alternative splice variants than mRNAs. Here, we have explored the efficiency of lncRNAs and mRNAs in producing various splice variants, given the number of exons in humans and mice. Intriguingly, lncRNAs produce more splice variants per exon, referred to as Transcript Complexity, than mRNAs.