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Updated: Jul 15, 2026
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Engineering Artificial Factors to Specifically Manipulate Alternative Splicing in Human Cells
Published on: April 26, 2017
Alternative splicing in cancer: noise, functional, or systematic?
Rolf I Skotheim1, Matthias Nees
1Department of Cancer Prevention, Institute for Cancer Research, Rikshospitalet-Radiumhospitalet Medical Center, Oslo, Norway.
The International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology
|April 10, 2007
Summary
Alternative splicing is altered in cancers, offering new insights into cancer biology. Understanding these cancer-specific splicing patterns can lead to novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies.
Area of Science:
- Molecular Biology
- Cancer Biology
- Genomics
Background:
- Alternative splicing generates gene variants, with patterns differing across cell types and development.
- Cancer cells exhibit significantly altered splicing, impacting gene function and potentially serving as biomarkers.
- The role of alternative splicing in cancer is increasingly recognized as actively regulated, not merely noise.
Purpose of the Study:
- To review the cell biology and biochemistry of alternative splicing in cancer.
- To explore differences in splicing mechanisms between normal and malignant cells.
- To highlight the potential of cancer-specific splice variants as diagnostic and therapeutic targets.
Main Methods:
- Literature mining and clustering of intensely investigated genes.
- Analysis of functional annotations for highly spliced gene classes.
- Examination of genomic technologies like microarrays to study transcript variation.
Main Results:
- Cancer-specific splice events, like CD44 antigen, illustrate regulatory mechanisms.
- The spliceosome and accessory proteins significantly impact transcript variation in cancer.
- Systems biology approaches are beginning to reveal the complexity of splicing in cancer research.
Conclusions:
- Alternative splicing is a critical, actively regulated process in cancer.
- Understanding cancer-specific splicing offers new avenues for diagnostics and therapeutics.
- Genomic technologies are uncovering a new layer of genetic information related to splicing in cancer.
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