Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XIII ConferenceJanuary 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Bing-Bing Wang , Volker Brendel
As an important post-transcriptional control method, alternative splicing (AS) can increase protein diversity and affect mRNA stability as well as translation efficiency. In mammalian systems, AS had been studied extensively by aligning large numbers of ESTs (Expressed Sequence Tags) and full-length cDNAs against the available genome sequences. Here we report AS in two model plants: Arabidopsis and rice. A total of 261,824 and 289,251 EST/cDNAs were aligned with the GeneSeqer software against the nearly completed Arabidopsis and rice genome sequences, respectively. In Arabidopsis, 4,161 of the 21,243 genes with EST/cDNA evidence (19.6%) showed 6,979 AS events. About 57.3% of these events are intron retention, and only 7.5% are exon skipping. In rice, 5,431 of the 28,971 genes with EST/cDNA evidence (18.7%) displayed 14,266 AS events, of which 43.0% are intron retention and 17.5% exon skipping. A small portion of the AS is conserved between Arabidopsis and rice. AS is less prevalent in plants than in human, which have more than half the genes alternatively spliced. The monocot plant rice seems to have more complex AS compared with the dicot plant Arabidopsis. We created a database and web site that summarizes the evidence for alternative splicing in plants (available at: http://www.plantGDB.org/prj/SiP/ASIP/). The poster will critically assess the extent of all types of alternative splicing in plants.