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Fast and furious: insights of back splicing regulation during nascent RNA synthesis

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Abstract

Alternative splicing of eukaryotic precursor (messenger) RNAs in the nucleus not only increases transcriptomic complexity, but also expands proteomic and functional diversity. In addition to basic types of alternative splicing, recent transcriptome-wide analyses have also suggested other new types of non-canonical splicing, such as back splicing and recursive splicing, and their widespread expression across species Increasing lines of evidence have suggested mechanisms for back splicing, including insights from analyses of nascent RNA sequencing. In this review, we discuss our current understanding of back splicing regulation, and highlight its distinct characteristics in processing during nascent RNA synthesis by taking advantage of metabolic tagging nascent RNA sequencing. Features of recursive splicing are also discussed in the perspective of nascent RNA sequencing.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Gordon G. Carmichael and Ling-Ling Chen for critical reading of this article, and Yang laboratory for discussion. Our work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31730111 to L.Y., 31925011 to L.Y., 91940306 to L.Y., 31801073 to W.X.), and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association (to W.X.) from Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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  1. CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200031, China

    Wei Xue, Xu-Kai Ma & Li Yang

  2. School of Life Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, 201210, China

    Li Yang

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Xue, W., Ma, XK. & Yang, L. Fast and furious: insights of back splicing regulation during nascent RNA synthesis. Sci. China Life Sci. 64, 1050–1061 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-020-1881-1

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