Widespread Use of Non-Productive Alternative Splice Sites in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Using RNA-Seq analysis of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) mutant strains, we show that many Saccharomyces cerevisiae intron-containing genes exhibit usage of alternative splice sites, but most transcripts generated by splicing from these sites are non-functional because they introduce premature termination codons leading to transcript degradation by NMD我们通过对无义介导的mRNA降解（nonsense-mediated mRNA decay, NMD）突变菌株开展RNA测序（RNA-Seq）分析，证实酿酒酵母（Saccharomyces cerevisiae）中大量含内含子基因可利用可变剪接位点；但经此类剪接位点剪接产生的绝大多数转录本均不具备功能，原因在于其引入了提前终止密码子，最终会被NMD途径介导降解。