Deep surveying of alternative splicing complexity in the human transcriptome by high-throughput sequencing

We carried out the first analysis of alternative splicing complexity in human tissues using mRNA-Seq data. New splice junctions were detected in 20% of multiexon genes, many of which are tissue specific. By combining mRNA-Seq and EST-cDNA sequence data, we estimate that transcripts from 95% of multiexon genes undergo alternative splicing and that there are 100,000 intermediate- to high-abundance alternative splicing events in major human tissues. From a comparison with quantitative alternative splicing microarray profiling data, we also show that mRNA-Seq data provide reliable measurements for exon inclusion levels. Keywords: mRNA expression Overall design: 32-nucleotide sequence reads from six human tissues including brain, cerebral cortex, heart, liver, lung and skeletal muscle.