Analysis of alternative splicing with microarrays

Abstract

Alternative splicing is one of the most important post-transcriptional processing steps that enhances genomic information by generating multiple RNA isoforms from a single gene. Recently, microarrays have been developed that can detect changes in splice site selection. Currently, the biggest challenge for the analysis of alternative splicing with microarrays is the bioinformatics analysis of array data and their low reproducibility by RT-PCR. Despite these problems, microarrays revealed an unexpected number of expressed RNAs, showed changes of alternative splicing in diseases and indicated that a splicing factor regulates a biologically meaningful set of genes.