Identification of a comprehensive alternative splicing function during epithelial-mesenchymal transition

Yushan Qiu; Yahong Zhang; Liwen Tian; Quan Zou; Pu Zhao

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.106517

Identification of a comprehensive alternative splicing function during epithelial-mesenchymal transition

iScience. 2023 Mar 30;26(4):106517. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106517. eCollection 2023 Apr 21.

Authors

Yushan Qiu¹, Yahong Zhang², Liwen Tian², Quan Zou³, Pu Zhao²

Affiliations

¹ College of Mathematics and Statistics, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, P.R.China.
² College of Life and Health Sciences, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, P.R.China.
³ Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610056, China.

Abstract

Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is the underlying mechanism for tumor metastasis and shows the metastatic potential of tumor cells. Although the transcriptional regulation of EMT has been well studied, the role of alternative splicing (AS) regulation in EMT remains largely uncharacterized. The rapid accumulation of RNA-seq datasets has provided the opportunities for developing computational methods to associate mRNA isoform variations with EMT. In this study, we propose regularization models to identify significant AS events during EMT. Our experimental results confirm that the predicted AS events are closely related to apoptosis, focal adhesion-invadopodium shift and tight junction formation that are essential during EMT. Therefore, our study highlights the broad role of posttranscriptional regulation during EMT and identifies key subsets of AS events serving as distinct regulatory nodes.

Keywords: Cancer; Cell biology; Molecular biology.