A single alternative splicing event might have had far-reaching consequences in the evolution of the nervous system in vertebrates, Gueroussov et al. report. The new findings show that one exon of the transcript encoding polypyrimidine tract-binding protein 1 (PTBP1) is skipped in mammals, whereas in other vertebrates this exon is present. PTBP1 binds to many RNAs to regulate alternative splicing on a large scale. Experiments in mammalian cells showed that the absence of exon 9 (exon 8 in some species) represses the activity of PTBP1 so that a mammalian-specific alternative splicing programme is activated during neuronal differentiation. Deletion of exon 9 leads to the appearance of mammalian-like features in chicken cells. These findings underscore the importance of differences in alternative splicing programming in vertebrate evolution.
References
Gueroussov, S. et al. An alternative splicing event amplifies evolutionary differences between vertebrates. Science 349, 868–873 (2015)
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Osório, J. Alternative splicing shapes vertebrate evolution. Nat Rev Genet 16, 565 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg4016
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg4016