Regulation of alternative splicing by histone modifications

Alternative splicing of pre-mRNA is a prominent mechanism to generate protein diversity, yet its regulation is poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate a direct role for histone modifications in alternative splicing. We find distinctive histone modification signatures which correlate with splicing outcome in a set of human genes. Modulation of histone modifications causes splice site switching. The mechanism for histone-mediated splice site selection involves a histone mark which is read by a chromatin protein, which in turn recruits a splicing regulator. These results outline an adaptor system for reading of histone marks by the pre-mRNA splicing machinery. To obtain an estimate of how many PTB-dependent alternative splicing events are regulated by SET2/MRG15-mediated recruitment of PTB, we carried out a genomewide comparative analysis of alternative splicing in hMSC cells depleted of either SETD2, MRG15 or PTB using specific siRNAs, or mock-depleted using a control siRNA.