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Updated: May 15, 2026

Detection of Alternative Splicing During Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition
Published on: October 9, 2014
The evolutionary landscape of alternative splicing in vertebrate species
Nuno L Barbosa-Morais1, Manuel Irimia, Qun Pan
1Banting and Best Department of Medical Research, Donnelly Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Abstract:
How species with similar repertoires of protein-coding genes differ so markedly at the phenotypic level is poorly understood. By comparing organ transcriptomes from vertebrate species spanning ~350 million years of evolution, we observed significant differences in alternative splicing complexity between vertebrate lineages, with the highest complexity in primates. Within 6 million years, the splicing profiles of physiologically equivalent organs diverged such that they are more strongly related to the identity of a species than they are to organ type. Most vertebrate species-specific splicing patterns are cis-directed. However, a subset of pronounced splicing changes are predicted to remodel protein interactions involving trans-acting regulators. These events likely further contributed to the diversification of splicing and other transcriptomic changes that underlie phenotypic differences among vertebrate species.
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