Intronic Alternative Splicing Regulators Identified by Comparative Genomics in Nematodes

Abstract

Many alternative splicing events are regulated by pentameric and hexameric intronic sequences that serve as binding sites for splicing regulatory factors. We hypothesized that intronic elements that regulate alternative splicing are under selective pressure for evolutionary conservation. Using a Wobble Aware Bulk Aligner genomic alignment of Caenorhabditis elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae, we identified 147 alternatively spliced cassette exons that exhibit short regions of high nucleotide conservation in the introns flanking the alternative exon. In vivo experiments on the alternatively spliced let-2 gene confirm that these conserved regions can be important for alternative splicing regulation. Conserved intronic element sequences were collected into a dataset and the occurrence of each pentamer and hexamer motif was counted. We compared the frequency of pentamers and hexamers in the conserved intronic elements to a dataset of all C. elegans intron sequences in order to identify short intronic motifs that are more likely to be associated with alternative splicing. High-scoring motifs were examined for upstream or downstream preferences in introns surrounding alternative exons. Many of the high- scoring nematode pentamer and hexamer motifs correspond to known mammalian splicing regulatory sequences, such as (T)GCATG, indicating that the mechanism of alternative splicing regulation is well conserved in metazoans. A comparison of the analysis of the conserved intronic elements, and analysis of the entire introns flanking these same exons, reveals that focusing on intronic conservation can increase the sensitivity of detecting putative splicing regulatory motifs. This approach also identified novel sequences whose role in splicing is under investigation and has allowed us to take a step forward in defining a catalog of splicing regulatory elements for an organism. In vivo experiments confirm that one novel high-scoring sequence from our analysis, (T)CTATC, is important for alternative splicing regulation of the unc-52 gene.

Synopsis

Alternative splicing of precursor messenger RNA is a process by which multiple protein isoforms are generated from a single gene. As many as 60% of human genes are processed in this manner, creating tissue-specific isoforms of proteins that may be a key factor in regulating the complexity of our physiology. One of the major challenges to understanding this process is to identify the sequences on the precursor messenger RNA responsible for splicing regulation. Some of these regulatory sequences occur in regions that are spliced out (called introns). This study tested the hypothesis that there should be evolutionary pressure to maintain these intronic regulatory sequences, even though intron sequence is non-coding and rapidly diverges between species. The authors employed a genomic alignment of two roundworms, Caenorhabditis elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae, to investigate the regulation of alternative splicing. By examining evolutionarily conserved stretches of introns flanking alternatively spliced exons, the authors identified and functionally confirmed splicing regulatory sequences. Many of the top scoring sequences match known mammalian regulators, suggesting the alternative splicing regulatory mechanism is conserved across all metazoans. Other sequences were not previously identified in mammals and may represent new alternative splicing regulatory elements in higher organisms or ones that may be specific to worms.