Identification of Alternative Splicing Events Using Expression Data from Tiling Microarray

• Activity Number: 88
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 9, 2004 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Biopharmaceutical Section
• Author(s): Lisa H. Ying*+ and Zhengyan Kan and John Castle and Jason Johnson and Vladimir Svetnik
• Companies: Merck & Co., Inc. and Merck & Co., Inc. and Merck & Co., Inc. and Merck & Co., Inc. and Merck & Co., Inc.
• Keywords: microarray ; alternative splicing ; Principle Component Analysis ; clustering

Abstract

A great challenge in the post-genomic era is to decipher how exons from the same genes are assembled differently into different transcripts through a mechanism called alternative splicing. It is well known that alternative splicing plays important roles in the regulation of gene functions and makes significant contribution to protein complexity. Recent studies suggest that more than half of human genes are alternatively spliced. A tiling array experiment was performed using custom ink jet microarrays, with probes tiled across 200 known genic regions. In total, RNA samples from 52 diverse tissues were hybridized. Several statistical methods/techniques such as robust Principle Component Analysis, Mahalanobis distance, clustering, etc., were utilized to identify the alternative splicing events. Our results were evaluated against known alternative splicing events based on transcript analysis (RefSeq, mRNA, and EST).