The rat beta-tropomyosin (beta-TM) gene encodes both skeletal muscle beta-TM mRNA and nonmuscle TM-1 mRNA via alternative RNA splicing. This gene contains eleven exons: exons 1-5, 8, and 9 are common to both mRNAs; exons 6 and 11 are used in fibroblasts as well as in smooth muscle, whereas exons 7 and 10 are used in skeletal muscle. Previously we demonstrated that utilization of the 3' splice s...

In the alternative splicing, intron retention, of histamine H(3) receptors in rats and mice, the short transcript isoforms that are excised alternatively spliced introns are easily detected in a very low level in rats and are undetectable in mice using the regular PCR protocol. The retained introns have common 5' splice site and different 3' splice sites. The detailed mechanism for the special ...

Artificial neural networks have been applied to the prediction of splice site location in human pre-mRNA. A joint prediction scheme where prediction of transition regions between introns and exons regulates a cutoff level for splice site assignment was able to predict splice site locations with confidence levels far better than previously reported in the literature. The problem of predicting do...

SR proteins are essential splicing factors that also influence 5' splice site choice. We show that addition of excess mixed SR proteins to a HeLa in vitro splicing system stimulates utilization of a novel 5' splice site (site 125) within the intron of the standard adenovirus pre-mRNA substrate. When U1 snRNPs are debilitated by sequestering the 5' end of U1 snRNA with a 2'-O-methyl oligoribonuc...

Alternative splicing involving the 3' tandem splice site NAGNAG sequence may play a role in the structure-function diversity of proteins. However, how 3' tandem splice site utilization is determined is not well understood. We previously demonstrated that 3' NAGNAG-based wobble splicing occurs mostly in a tissue- and developmental stage-independent manner. Bioinformatic analysis reveals that the...

Accurate splice site prediction is a critical component of any computational approach to gene prediction in higher organisms. Existing approaches generally use sequence-based models that capture local dependencies among nucleotides in a small window around the splice site. We present evidence that computationally predicted secondary structure of moderate length pre-mRNA subsequencies contains i...

A 5' splice site located in a 3' untranslated region (3'UTR) has been shown previously to inhibit gene expression. Natural examples of inhibitory 5' splice sites have been identified in the late 3'UTRs of papillomaviruses and are thought to inhibit viral late gene expression at early stages of the viral life cycle. In this study, we demonstrate that the interaction of the human immunodeficiency...

The Drosophila fruitless (fru) gene encodes a transcription factor that essentially regulates all aspects of male courtship behavior. The use of alternative 5'-splice sites generates fru isoforms that determine gender-appropriate sexual behaviors. Alternative splicing of fru is regulated by TRA and TRA2 and depends on an exonic splicing enhancer (fruRE) consisting of three 13-nucleotide repeat ...

Discriminant analysis is applied to the problem of recognition 5'-, internal and 3'-exons in human DNA sequences. Specific recognition functions were developed for revealing exons of particular types. The method based on a splice site prediction algorithm that uses the linear Fisher discriminant to combine the information about significant triplet frequencies of various functional parts of spli...