Section: New Results

Endothelial, epithelial, and fibroblast cells exhibit specific splicing programs independently of their tissue of origin

Alternative splicing is the main mechanism of increasing the proteome diversity coded by a limited number of genes. It is well established that different tissues or organs express different splicing variants. However, organs are composed of common major cell types, including fibroblasts, epithelial, and endothelial cells. By analysing large-scale data sets generated by The ENCODE Project Consortium and after extensive RT-PCR validation, we demonstrated that each of the three major cell types expresses a specific splicing program independently of its organ origin [17] . Furthermore, by analysing splicing factor expression across samples, publicly available splicing factor binding site data sets (CLIP-seq), and exon array data sets after splicing factor depletion, we identified several splicing factors that contribute to establishing these cell type-specific splicing programs.