When epigenetics meets alternative splicing: The roles of DNA methylation and GC architecture

摘要

The process of pre-mRNA splicing has been studied for more than 30 years, yet it is far from being fully understood. Accumulating evidence suggests that many splicing events occur cotranscriptionally and that the mRNA precursor remains associated with the chromatin until all of the introns have been removed. Cotrans-criptional splicing adds many more factors that might take part in the complex and highly regulated process of exon recognition. If cis-acting regulatory factors, such as splice-site sequences and splicing factors binding domains, did not provide enough complexity, splicing researchers are now realizing that the chromatin structure itself might also affect the exon selection process [1].