Genome-wide analysis of acute effects of ligth on the regulation of alternative splicing in Arabidopsis thaliana

ESTEFANÍA MANCINI; SABRINA E. SANCHEZ; RUBEN G. SCHLAEN; ANDRÉS ROMANOWSKI; MARCELO J. YANOVSKY

Bahia Blanca

Conferencia; VI Argentinian Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology; 2015

Comité Organizador del VI ACB^2

Alternative Splicing (AS) is the process through which a single gene can generate multiple different isoforms, and this versatility is thought to contribute substantially to phenotipic variation in higher eukaryotes. Besides the opportunity of increasing the number of proteins through this process, AS can also influence many physiological processes controlling transcript levels. Nowadays we can explore transcriptomic changes using high throughput sequencing (RNA-Seq). In this technique, mRNA is extracted from collected samples and then is fragmented, amplified and sequenced in a shotgun manner. Resulting reads are aligned against a reference genome and then statistical analysis is performed in order to get differential expressed genes. Despite being a very powerful technology, very few algorithms were developed for the analysis of AS in plants. At the same time, although AS is a powerful mechanism to control gene expression, how AS changes in response to environmental signals that impact on plant physiological processes has not been extensively studied.