Levan Atanelov | PubMed Health

PubMed2005

Targeting alternatively spliced sequence features for cancer diagnosis and therapeutics.

Alternative splicing is emerging as a major new mechanism of functional regulation in mammals, and there is increasing evidence that human cancers often involve significant changes in alternative splicing. In some cases, these changes contribute functionally to the maintenance of the transformed state and could be useful as novel targets for anticancer therapy. In other cases, they reflect changes due to tumorigenesis and could be useful for diagnostic purposes. Fundamentally, alternative splicing offers a novel opportunity to target individual subregions of a gene product that are preferentially expressed in tumors and which are not found in isoforms of the same gene found preferentially in normal tissues.

Alternative Splicing↗

PubMed2003

ASAP: the Alternative Splicing Annotation Project.

Recently, genomics analyses have demonstrated that alternative splicing is widespread in mammalian genomes (30-60% of genes reported to have multiple isoforms), and may be one of their most important mechanisms of functional regulation. However, by comparison with other genomics data such as genome annotation, SNPs, or gene expression, there exists relatively little database infrastructure for the study of alternative splicing. We have constructed an online database ASAP (the Alternative Splicing Annotation Project) for biologists to access and mine the enormous wealth of alternative splicing information coming from genomics and proteomics. ASAP is based on genome-wide analyses of alternative splicing in human (30 793 alternative splice relationships found) from detailed alignment of expressed sequences onto the genomic sequence. ASAP provides precise gene exon-intron structure, alternative splicing, tissue specificity of alternative splice forms, and protein isoform sequences resulting from alternative splicing. Moreover, it can help biologists design probe sequences for distinguishing specific mRNA isoforms. ASAP is intended to be a community resource for collaborative annotation of alternative splice forms, their regulation, and biological functions. The URL for ASAP is http://www.bioinformatics.ucla.edu/ASAP.

Alternative Splicing↗