Steven E. Brenner
brenner@compbio.berkeley.edu

Alternative Role for Alternative Splicing: RNA Surveillance for Gene Regulation

More than one third of all human genes are alternatively spliced, yet the functional consequences of alternate isoforms remain largely unknown.  In a comprehensive analysis of reliably-inferred human
alternative isoforms, we discovered that many are candidates for nonsense-mediated mRNA decay
(NMD), an RNA surveillance system.  It may be that these transcripts are subjected to regulated unproductive splicing and translation (RUST), which is a general mechanism of controlling protein expression that been established for a handful of genes.