Fascinated by the potential of long read technologies to make a difference in our knowldege of the transcriptome, two years ago we started generating Nanopore dRNA data for different yeast species, including the yeast S. pombe. This organism is ideal to study alternative splicing because a large proportion of the genes have introns yet the number of introns, and their size, is quite small, meaning that we can recover many full length transcripts.
The study has resulted in the detection of hundreds of alternative splice isoforms, some of them at unexpectedly high frequencies. We have also found that lowly expressed transcripts, and a subset of the intron retention isoforms, tend to have much longer than average poly(A) lengths. In addition, some of the splice isoforms can potentially encode new proteins according to Ribo-seq data. Lots of fun and a new collaboration with our pombe neighbors at the PRBB!
The paper is now published in Genome Research, you can access it here!
