Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on November 24, 2005
Bioinformatics 2006 22(6):692-698; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bti795
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Bioinformatic analysis of exon repetition, exon scrambling and trans-splicing in humans
1Department of Medicine and Program in Bioinformatics and Proteomics/Genomics, Medical University of Ohio Toledo, OH 43614, USA
2Department of Bioinformatics, Institute of Molecular Genetics RAS, Moscow 123182, Russia
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Motivation: Using bioinformatic approaches we aimed to characterize poorly understood abnormalities in splicing known as exon scrambling, exon repetition and trans-splicing.
Results: We developed a software package that allows large-scale comparison of all human expressed sequence tags (EST) sequences to the entire set of human gene sequences. Among 5 992 495 EST sequences, 401 cases of exon repetition and 416 cases of exon scrambling were found. The vast majority of identified ESTs contain fragments rather than full-length repeated or scrambled exons. Their structures suggest that the scrambled or repeated exon fragments may have arisen in the process of cDNA cloning and not from splicing abnormalities. Nevertheless, we found 11 cases of full-length exon repetition showing that this phenomenon is real yet very rare. In searching for examples of trans-splicing, we looked only at reproducible events where at least two independent ESTs represent the same putative trans-splicing event. We found 15 ESTs representing five types of putative trans-splicing. However, all 15 cases were derived from human malignant tissues and could have resulted from genomic rearrangements. Our results provide support for a very rare but physiological occurrence of exon repetition, but suggest that apparent exon scrambling and trans-splicing result, respectively, from in vitro artifact and gene-level abnormalities.
Availability: Exon–Intron Database (EID) is available at http://www.meduohio.edu/bioinfo/eid. Programs are available at http://www.meduohio.edu/bioinfo/software.html. The Laboratory website is available at http://www.meduohio.edu/medicine/fedorov
Contact: afedorov{at}meduohio.edu
Supplementary information: Supplementary file is available at http://www.meduohio.edu/bioinfo/software.html
Received on July 20, 2005; revised on November 3, 2005; accepted on November 18, 2005
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