Aurora-A phosphorylates splicing factors and regulates alternative splicing

The goal of this study is to identify the effect of inhibition of Aurora-A kinase activity on gene expression and RNA splicing. The perturbation of Aurora-A is well known to affect cell cycle distribution. Therefore, we coupled the inhibition of Aurora-A with cell synchronization procedure in order to avoid the indirect effect of cell cycle perturbation on splicing changes. The mRNA -seq libraries were prepared and subjected to paired-end sequencing on Illumina HiSeq 2500 lanes. Differential gene expression and splicing analysis were carried using the edgeR tool and VAST-tools respectively. The RNA seq analysis identified that pharmacological inhibition of Aurora-A affects alternative splicing of 505 genes while having a marginal effect on gene expression. Overall our work identified Aurora-A as a novel splicing kinase and for the first time, describes a broad role of Aurora-A in regulating alternative splicing. Overall design: We compared differential gene expression and alternative splicing profiles between DMSO and MLN8237 (Aurora-A kinase inhibitor) conditions in G1, G2 and mitotic phases of the cell cycle.