Genome-wide Identification and Characterisation of Tissue-specific RNA Editing Events in D. melanogaster and their Potential Role in Regulating Alternative Splicing

RNA editing is a widespread mechanism that plays a crucial role in diversifying gene products. Its abundance and importance in regulating cellular processes were revealed using new sequencing technologies. The majority of these editing events, however, cannot be associated with regulatory mechanisms. We use tissue-specific high-throughput libraries of D. melanogaster to study RNA editing. We introduce an analysis pipeline that utilises large input data and explicitly captures ADAR's requirement for double-stranded regions. It combines probabilistic and deterministic filters and can identify RNA editing events with a low estimated false positive rate. Analysing ten different tissue types, we predict 2879 editing sites and provide their detailed characterisation. Our analysis pipeline accurately distinguishes genuine editing sites from SNPs and sequencing and mapping artefacts. Our editing sites are three times more likely to occur in exons with multiple splicing acceptor/donor sites than in exons with unique splice sites (p-value