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Definition
Alternative splicing describes the processes that allow the generation of different forms of mature mRNA (messenger RNA) from a single gene.
Introduction
Alternative Splicing
Splicing is a mechanism by which the transcribed exons of a gene are combined into mature mRNA transcripts. The process of generating different transcripts via distinct exon combinations is known as alternative splicing.
Alternative splicing has been shown to be present at the transcriptional level in almost all multi-exon genes (Wang et al. 2008), and these different mRNA products may be translated into different protein isoforms, potentially allowing for the generation of multiple proteins from a single coding gene. An extreme example of the diversity that alternative splicing can achieve is the Drosophila Dscam gene, which could in theory encode 38,016 distinct spliced variants, nearly three times the total number of genes in Drosophila (Black 2000).
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References
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Ezkurdia, I., Valencia, A., Tress, M.L. (2019). Alternative Splicing. In: Roberts, G., Watts, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biophysics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35943-9_427-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35943-9_427-1
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