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Alternative Splicing

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Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior
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Synonyms

Differential splicing

Definition

Alternative splicing is the process in which multiple transcripts are generated from a single gene by different combinations of exons of the primary transcript.

Introduction

In mammalian cells, a diverse array of proteins is generated by the regulation of gene expression at multiple levels including transcription, alternative splicing, mRNA stability- decay, RNA editing, alternative polyadenylation, proteasomal degradation, and posttranslational modifications. These regulations determine the gene expression outcome. Splicing is the process in which noncoding introns are removed from the primary transcript and coding exons are joined to form functional mRNA. In alternative splicing, by using different splice sites, multiple mRNA and subsequently protein variants are generated from the same gene (Blencowe 2006). From RNA sequencing data, it is now revealed that around 95% of human genes undergo alternative splicing (Pan et al. 2008). The...

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References

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Correspondence to Buddhi Prakash Jain .

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Jain, B.P. (2017). Alternative Splicing. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_56-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_56-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47829-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47829-6

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