Splicing with inverted order of exons occurs proximal to large introns

Following our studies which showed that the alpha and beta exons of the chicken c-ets-1 gene are not conserved in the human homologue, we succeeded in identifying a novel human c-ets-1 transcript in which the normal order of exons is scrambled. By PCR and RNase protection assays, we demonstrated that while the order of exons is different from that in genomic DNA, splicing of these exons in aberrant order occurs in pairs and at the same conserved consensus splice sites used in the normally spliced transcript. The scrambled transcript is non-polyadenylated and is expressed at much lower levels than the normal transcript. It is not the consequence of genomic rearrangement at the ets-1 locus nor is it due to the transcription of any ets-1 pseudogene. These results confirm previous observations of scrambled splicing.