RNA moleculeWIKIMEDIA, CORENTIN LE REUNThe majority of mammalian protein-coding genes have a number of possible transcripts, generated by the variable inclusion of exons. It was thought that these so-called alternative splicing events might be conserved between species, but two studies published today (December 20) in Science reveal that most are not. The researchers even propose that the high degree of alternative splicing variability may be a driving force of species divergence .
“It was somewhat generally assumed that splicing differences that you see between brain and muscle in the mouse would be similar between brain and muscle in the human,” said Donny Licatalosi, professor of RNA molecular biology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who did not participate in the studies, “but what both of these studies are showing is that is not the case. There is a large amount of species-specific alternative splicing.”
A major question in vertebrate evolutionary biology is “how do physical and behavioral differences arise if we have a very similar set of genes to that of the mouse, chicken, or frog?” said Ben Blencowe, a cell and molecular biology professor at the University of Toronto, who led one of the ...
