Profiling novel alternative splicing within multiple tissues puts insight into the porcine genome annotation

Abstract

Background Alternative splicing (AS) is a process that mRNA precursor splices intron to form the mature mRNA. AS plays important roles in contributing to transcriptome and proteome divert. However, to date there is no research about pig AS in genome-wide level by RNA sequencing. Results To characterize the AS in pigs, herein we detected genome-wide transcripts and events by RNA sequencing technology (RNA-seq) 34 different tissues in Duroc pigs. In total, we identified 138, 403 AS events and 29, 270 expressed genes. We found alternative donor site was the most common AS form, which is accounted for 44% of the total AS events. The percentage of the other 3 AS forms (Exon skipping, Alternative acceptor site and Intron retention) are all around 19%. The results showed that the most common AS events (alternative donor site) can produce different transcripts or different proteins which affect the biological process. Among these AS events, 109, 483 were novel AS events, and the number of alternative donor splice site has increased the most (Accounting for 44% of the novel AS events). Conclusions The expression of gene with tissue specific AS events showed that the functions of these genes were consistent with the tissue function. AS increased proteome diversity and resulted in novel proteins that gained and lost important functional domains. In summary, these findings extend genome annotation and highlight roles that AS acts in tissue identity in pig.