Alternative splicing modulated by genetic variants demonstrates accelerated evolution regulated by highly conserved proteins.

Genome Res

Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA; Department of Bioengineering, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA; Bioinformatics Interdepartmental Program, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA; Molecular Biology Institute, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA.

Published: April 2016

Identification of functional genetic variants and elucidation of their regulatory mechanisms represent significant challenges of the post-genomic era. A poorly understood topic is the involvement of genetic variants in mediating post-transcriptional RNA processing, including alternative splicing. Thus far, little is known about the genomic, evolutionary, and regulatory features of genetically modulated alternative splicing (GMAS). Here, we systematically identified intronic tag variants for genetic modulation of alternative splicing using RNA-seq data specific to cellular compartments. Combined with our previous method that identifies exonic tags for GMAS, this study yielded 622 GMAS exons. We observed that GMAS events are highly cell type independent, indicating that splicing-altering genetic variants could have widespread function across cell types. Interestingly, GMAS genes, exons, and single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) all demonstrated positive selection or accelerated evolution in primates. We predicted that GMAS SNVs often alter binding of splicing factors, with SRSF1 affecting the most GMAS events and demonstrating global allelic binding bias. However, in contrast to their GMAS targets, the predicted splicing factors are more conserved than expected, suggesting that cis-regulatory variation is the major driving force of splicing evolution. Moreover, GMAS-related splicing factors had stronger consensus motifs than expected, consistent with their susceptibility to SNV disruption. Intriguingly, GMAS SNVs in general do not alter the strongest consensus position of the splicing factor motif, except the more than 100 GMAS SNVs in linkage disequilibrium with polymorphisms reported by genome-wide association studies. Our study reports many GMAS events and enables a better understanding of the evolutionary and regulatory features of this phenomenon.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4817768PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/gr.193359.115DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

alternative splicing
16
genetic variants
16
gmas events
12
gmas snvs
12
splicing factors
12
gmas
11
accelerated evolution
8
splicing
8
evolutionary regulatory
8
regulatory features
8

Similar Publications

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!