Transcriptome Survey of the Contribution of Alternative Splicing to Proteome Diversity in Arabidopsis thaliana

Abstract

Alternative splicing (AS) functions as a key regulatory mechanism and increases transcriptome and proteome diversity. Recent genome-wide studies have substantially expanded our estimation of the frequency of AS in plants (Reddy et al., 2013; Staiger and Brown, 2013). However, the proportion of AS events that lead to increased proteome diversity in plants, rather than imperfect pre-mRNA processing, remains unsolved. Here, we report an analysis of AS events in presumably translated mRNAs, i.e., those associated with polysomes, in Arabidopsis thaliana.