Mechanism of alternative splicing of yeast HEH1 through competing 5’ splice sites
Spliceosomes remove non-coding introns from precursor messenger RNA (pre-mRNA). They also perform alternative splicing of pre-mRNAs, producing multiple protein-coding mRNAs from a given gene. Alternative selection of competing 5' splice sites in introns is known to occur early in the splicing cycle by U1 snRNA and RNA-binding proteins. We studied the alternative splicing mechanism of yeast HEH1/SRC1 pre-mRNA, which harbours competing 5' splice sites. Surprisingly, early splicing factors were dispensable for this process. Instead, core spliceosomes containing U5 and U6 snRNAs selected and processed the closely-spaced 5' splice sites for alternative splicing.
A co-author, Balashankar R Pillai, was a BS-MS student.
Link for the paper: https://www.nature.com/
