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Updated: Feb 9, 2026

Identification of Alternative Splicing and Polyadenylation in RNA-seq Data
Published on: June 24, 2021
Vex-seq: high-throughput identification of the impact of genetic variation on pre-mRNA splicing efficiency
Scott I Adamson1, Lijun Zhan1, Brenton R Graveley2
1Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences, Institute for Systems Genomics, UConn Health, Farmington, CT, USA.
Abstract:
Understanding the functional impact of genomic variants is a major goal of modern genetics and personalized medicine. Although many synonymous and non-coding variants act through altering the efficiency of pre-mRNA splicing, it is difficult to predict how these variants impact pre-mRNA splicing. Here, we describe a massively parallel approach we use to test the impact on pre-mRNA splicing of 2059 human genetic variants spanning 110 alternative exons. This method, called variant exon sequencing (Vex-seq), yields data that reinforce known mechanisms of pre-mRNA splicing, identifies variants that impact pre-mRNA splicing, and will be useful for increasing our understanding of genome function.
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