The mechanism and detection of alternative splicing events in circular RNAs

Xiaohan Li; Bing Zhang; Fuyu Li; Kequan Yu; Yunfei Bai

doi:10.7717/peerj.10032

The mechanism and detection of alternative splicing events in circular RNAs

PeerJ. 2020 Sep 25:8:e10032. doi: 10.7717/peerj.10032. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Xiaohan Li¹, Bing Zhang¹, Fuyu Li¹, Kequan Yu¹, Yunfei Bai¹

Affiliation

¹ State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, School of Biological Sciences and Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.

Abstract

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are considered as functional biomolecules with tissue/development-specific expression patterns. Generally, a single gene may generate multiple circRNA variants by alternative splicing, which contain different combinations of exons and/or introns. Due to the low abundance of circRNAs as well as overlapped with their linear counterparts, circRNA enrichment protocol is needed prior to sequencing. Compared with numerous algorithms, which use back-splicing reads for detection and functional characterization of circRNAs, original bioinformatic analyzing tools have been developed to large-scale determination of full-length circRNAs and accurate quantification. This review provides insights into the complexity of circRNA biogenesis and surveys the recent progresses in the experimental and bioinformatic methodologies that focus on accurately full-length circRNAs identification.

Keywords: Alternative splicing; Detection method; Full-length circRNAs; circRNA enrichment.

Grants and funding

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 61871121). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.