title: Detecting over-represented motifs in alternatively spliced exons using Gibbs sampling.
abstract: Alternative pre-mRNA splicing is a biological mechanism with significant prevalence in complex organisms and experimentally verified association with numerous disease-causing factors. Splicing-related proteins play a significant regulatory role during this process. In this study, we applied a stochastic analysis of alternatively spliced human genes based on Gibbs sampling, in order to identify short consensus sequences that are over-represented compared to a reference Markov model describing constitutive exons of the same genes. The analysis resulted in a set of statistically significant over-represented motifs. The biological importance of these motifs was assessed by estimating the likelihood of being identified by cis-acting elements that correspond to the binding domains of splicing enhancers/silencers. The results indicate that the identified over-represented sequences are often similar to those recognized by known regulatory splicing elements.
authors.affiliation: Student Member, IEEE, Lab. of Medical Informatics, Faculty of Medicine, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124, P.O.Box 323, Greece, andigoni@med.auth.gr.
authors.forename: Andigoni
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Malousi
authors.forename: Sofia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kouidou
authors.forename: Nicos
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Maglaveras
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D017398:Alternative Splicing; D005091:Exons; D006801:Humans; D008390:Markov Chains; D008957:Models, Genetic; D012322:RNA Precursors / Q000235:genetics
chemical_list: D012322:RNA Precursors