A little more detailed information about splicing mechanisms:
- 5’ splice site: GU dinucleotide - recognized by the splicing machinery
- 3’ splice site: AG dinucleotide - recognized by splicing machinery
- Polypyrimidine tract - a U-rich sequence located within an intron that binds splicing factors.
- Branch point motif - a conserved adenine (A) located within an intron that is directly involved in the chemistry of RNA splicing.
- Regulatory elements - these are sequences in the pre-mRNA that can recruit positive and negative regulatory factors to enhance or silence specific splicing events.
- Exonic splicing enhancers/silencers (ESEs, ESSs)
- Intronic splicing enhancers/silencers (ISEs, ISSs)
The scientists at UC Santa Cruz also have provided an explanation of splicing with references that I have posted as an OpenASO Wiki page.
This 2008 RNA journal article provides a fairly straight forward summary of what is known about mammalian splicing regulation.
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