MBE Advance Access published online on February 1, 2007
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msm023
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© 2007 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Research Article |
High Qualitative and Quantitative Conservation of Alternative Splicing in Caenorhabditis elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae
Molecular Evolution Group, Department of Molecular Biology, University of Copenhagen, Ole Maaløes Vej 5, DK-2200 Copenhagen N, Denmark
2 Current address: Departament de Genètica, Universitat de Barcelona. Av. Diagonal, 645, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
1 Corresponding Author: Jakob Lewin Rukov, Molecular Evolution Group, Department of Molecular Biology, University of Copenhagen, Ole Maaløes Vej 5, DK-2200 København Ø, Denmark, e-mail: jlrukov{at}bi.ku.dk, ph: 35321314, fax: 35321300
Accepted for publication December 18, 2006.
Alternative Splicing (AS) is an important contributor to proteome diversity and is regarded as an explanatory factor for the relatively low number of human genes compared to less complex animals. To assess the evolutionary conservation of AS and its developmental regulation, we have investigated the qualitative and quantitative expression of 21 orthologous alternative splice events through the development of two nematode species separated by 85-110 million years of evolutionary time. We demonstrate that most of these alternative splice events present in C. elegans are conserved in C. briggsae. Moreover, we find that relative isoform expression levels vary significantly during development for 78% of the AS events and that this quantitative variation is highly conserved between the two species. Our results suggest that AS is generally tightly regulated through development and that the regulatory mechanisms controlling AS are to a large extent conserved during the evolution of Caenorhabditis. This strong conservation indicates that both major and minor splice forms have important functional roles and that the relative quantities in which they are expressed are crucial. Our results therefore suggest that the quantitative regulation of isoform expression levels is an intrinsic part of most AS events. Moreover, our results indicate that AS contributes little to transcript variation in Caenorhabditis genes and that gene duplication may be the major evolutionary mechanism for the origin of novel transcripts in these two species.
Key Words: Alternative Splicing • Caenorhabditis • Transcriptome diversity • Evodevo
* These authors contributed equally to this work
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