Splicing-sensitive DNA-microarrays: Peculiarities and application in biomedical research (review)

Abstract

Alternative splicing (AS) provides a variety of protein and mature mRNA isoforms encoded by a single gene, and is the essential component of cell and tissue differentiation and functioning. DNA-microarrays are highly productive transcriptome research technique both at the level of total gene expression assessment and alternatively spliced mRNA isoforms exploration. The study of AS patterns requires thorough probe design to achieve appropriate accuracy of the analysis. There are two types of splicing-sensitive DNA-microarrays. The first type contain probes targeted to internal exonic sequences (exon bodies); the second type contain probes targeted to exon bodies and exon-exon and exon-intron junctions. So, the first section focused on probe sequence design, general features of splicing-sensitive DNA-microarrays and their main advantages and limitations. The results of AS research obtained using DNA-microarrays have been reviewed in special section. In particular, DNA-microarrays were used to reveal a number pre-mRNA processing and splicing mechanisms, to investigate AS patterns associated with cancer, cell and tissue differentiation. Splicing machinery regulation was demonstrated to be an essential step during carcinogenesis and differentiation. The examples of application of splicing-sensitive DNA-microarrays for diagnostic markers discovering and pathology mechanism elucidation were also reviewed. Investigations of AS role in pluripotency, stem cell commitment, immune and infected cells functioning during immune response are the promising future directions. Splicing-sensitive DNA-microarrays are relatively inexpensive but powerful research tool that give reason to suppose their introduction in clinical practice within the next few years.