Does alternative splicing cause cancer?
Does alternative splicing cause cancer?
Recently, it was reported that splicing may be closely associated with the occurrence of tumors, and that abnormal changes in alternative splicing could affect tumor progression. It could also disrupt the protein interaction pathways in tumor development.
What is alternative splicing and why is it important in eukaryotes?
Alternative splicing of RNA is a crucial process for changing the genomic instructions into functional proteins. It plays a critical role in the regulation of gene expression and protein diversity in a variety of eukaryotes. In humans, approximately 95% of multi-exon genes undergo alternative splicing.
What is alternative splicing used for?
The overall function of alternative splicing is to increase the diversity of the mRNA expressed from the genome. Due to the combinatorial control mechanisms that regulate alternative exon recognition, splicing programs coordinate the generation of mRNA isoforms from multiple genes.
How does aberrant splicing cause cancer?
The proteins encoded by these abnormal transcripts are often truncated or missing domains, thereby altering protein function or conferring new functions altogether. Thus, aberrant splicing regulation has genome-wide effects, potentially altering gene expression in many cancer-associated pathways.
What is alternative splicing for dummies?
Alternative splicing is the process of selecting different combinations of splice sites within a messenger RNA precursor (pre-mRNA) to produce variably spliced mRNAs. These multiple mRNAs can encode proteins that vary in their sequence and activity, and yet arise from a single gene.
Can alternative splicing be bad?
Such variants affecting splicing can be classified as pathogenic mutations or genetic variations causing predisposition to disease. The first category usually has a devastating effect on splicing, with a substantial loss of original protein function or even acquisition of an antagonistic function.
Why do cells employ alternative splicing?
Why is alternative splicing important? The mechanisms of alternative splicing help to explain how one gene can be encoded into numerous proteins with various functions. This complexity helps drive the cellular differentiation and diversity observed throughout biology.
What is the consequence of alternative splicing?
Alternative splicing has a central impact in stem cell biology by affecting the core pluripotency factors, which produce functionally diverse splice isoforms that have determinative roles on cell state.
What is alternative splicing and why is it beneficial in an organism?
Alternative splicing is a molecular mechanism that modifies pre-mRNA constructs prior to translation. This process can produce a diversity of mRNAs from a single gene by arranging coding sequences (exons) from recently spliced RNA transcripts into different combinations.
Can alternative splicing lead to mutation?
Changes in alternative splicing can be the cause or consequence of human diseases. There are only a few reports of mutations in core elements of the splicing machinery that result in human diseases.