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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 17, 2026

Genome-wide Surveillance of Transcription Errors in Eukaryotic Organisms

Genome-wide Surveillance of Transcription Errors in Eukaryotic Organisms

Published on: September 13, 2018

Transcript diversity reflects deleterious RNA processing errors shaped by population size in metazoans.

Kai Mi¹, Lili Guan^1,2, Bandhan Sarker¹

¹Bio-X Institutes, Key Laboratory for the Genetics of Developmental and Neuropsychiatric Disorders, Ministry of Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.

|April 16, 2026

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Transcript diversity from alternative transcription initiation, splicing, and polyadenylation is largely detrimental. This diversity decreases with larger population sizes, supporting an error hypothesis over an adaptive one.

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Area of Science:

Molecular Biology
Evolutionary Biology
Genomics

Background:

Eukaryotic genes generate diverse transcripts via alternative transcription initiation (ATI), alternative splicing (AS), and alternative polyadenylation (APA).
The biological significance of this transcript diversity is debated, with hypotheses suggesting it is either adaptive or largely deleterious due to molecular errors.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the role of effective population size (Ne) in shaping transcript diversity.
To test the prediction that transcript diversity declines with increasing Ne, as predicted by the error hypothesis.

Main Methods:

Analysis of 166 transcriptomes from 75 metazoan species.
Quantification of transcript diversity using the percentage of minor ATI, AS, and APA sites.
Correlation analysis between transcript diversity metrics and Ne or its proxies.

Main Results:

Transcript diversity, measured by the usage of minor ATI, AS, and APA sites, significantly decreases with increasing effective population size (Ne).
This inverse correlation was observed across a diverse range of metazoan species.

Conclusions:

The findings support the error hypothesis, suggesting that transcript diversity is largely a byproduct of molecular errors in transcription and RNA processing.
Natural selection is more effective at minimizing these errors in species with larger effective population sizes, leading to reduced transcript diversity.