title: Genome-wide landscape of alternative splicing events in Brachypodium distachyon.
abstract: Recently, Brachypodium distachyon has emerged as a model plant for studying monocot grasses and cereal crops. Using assembled expressed transcript sequences and subsequent mapping to the corresponding genome, we identified 1219 alternative splicing (AS) events spanning across 2021 putatively assembled transcripts generated from 941 genes. Approximately, 6.3% of expressed genes are alternatively spliced in B. distachyon. We observed that a majority of the identified AS events were related to retained introns (55.5%), followed by alternative acceptor sites (16.7%). We also observed a low percentage of exon skipping (5.0%) and alternative donor site events (8.8%). The 'complex event' that consists of a combination of two or more basic splicing events accounted for ∼14.0%. Comparative AS transcript analysis revealed 163 and 39 homologous pairs between B. distachyon and Oryza sativa and between B. distachyon and Arabidopsis thaliana, respectively. In all, we found 16 AS transcripts to be conserved in all 3 species. AS events and related putative assembled transcripts annotation can be systematically browsed at Plant Alternative Splicing Database (http://proteomics.ysu.edu/altsplice/plant/).
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, OH 44555, USA.
authors.forename: Braden
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Walters
authors.forename: Gengkon
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Lum
authors.forename: Gaurav
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sablok
authors.forename: Xiang Jia
authors.initials: XJ
authors.lastname: Min
mesh_terms: D017398:Alternative Splicing; D058431:Brachypodium / Q000235:genetics*; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D005091:Exons; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D017343:Genes, Plant; D018745:Genome, Plant; D023281:Genomics; D007438:Introns