Estimating rates of alternative splicing in mammals and invertebrates (original) (raw)

Nature Genetics volume 36, pages 915–916 (2004)Cite this article

To the editor:

The sequencing of the human genome showed that humans have ∼30,000 genes. This finding raised the possibility that alternative splicing, rather than an increased number of expressed genomic loci, was responsible for the functional complexity of vertebrates relative to invertebrates1. It has been estimated that 40–60% of all human genes1,2,3,4 and 74% of multiexon human genes5 are alternatively spliced. These estimates do not take into account how many different alternative splice forms exist for a given gene. Brett et al. examined alternative splicing in seven species, including human, using large-scale expressed-sequence tag (EST) analysis6. They concluded that vertebrates and invertebrates had similar rates of alternative splicing, not only with respect to the proportion of the genes affected but also with respect to the number of alternative splicing forms per gene. The method they used depends on the extent of EST coverage in the underlying data sets.

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Figure 1: Extent of alternative splicing in four organisms.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from BioGreen 21 Program of the Korean Rural Development Administration (to H.K.), by the Brain Korea 21 Project of the Ministry of Education (to H.K.), by a grant from the US National Human Genome Research Institute (to J.O.) and by a grant from the US National Institute of Mental Health (to J.O.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Agricultural Biotechnology, Seoul National University San 56-1, Sillim-dong, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, 151-742, Korea
    Heebal Kim
  2. Laboratory of Statistical Genetics, Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue, New York, 10021, New York, USA
    Robert Klein, Jacek Majewski & Jurg Ott

Authors

  1. Heebal Kim
  2. Robert Klein
  3. Jacek Majewski
  4. Jurg Ott

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Correspondence toHeebal Kim.

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Kim, H., Klein, R., Majewski, J. et al. Estimating rates of alternative splicing in mammals and invertebrates.Nat Genet 36, 915–916 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng0904-915

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