Tracking the evolution of alternatively spliced exons within the Dscam family

m.giddings submitted, created time 1 year 3 months (www.biomedcentral.com)

The Dscam gene in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, contains twenty-four exons, four of which are composed of tandem arrays that each undergo mutually exclusive alternative splicing (4, 6, 9 and 17), potentially generating 38,016 protein isoforms. This degree of transcript diversity has not been found in mammalian homologs of Dscam. The researchers examined the molecular evolution of exons within this gene family to locate the point of divergence for this alternative splicing pattern.

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