Analysis of Alternative Splicing Conservation Between Brassica and Arabidopsis

We performed analyses of Illumina RNA-seq data and EST data from Brassica and Arabidopsis to examine the level of conservation in alternative splicing events, and to identify and further characterize conserved AS events.
  Alternative donor and acceptor events are significantly overrepresented among conserved events, whereas intron retention and exon skipping events are underrepresented.  Conserved AS events are significantly shorter, less likely to be in the 3′UTR, and they are enriched for genes whose products function in the chloroplast. We further characterized three genes with conserved AS events.  This study identifies many AS events that are conserved between Brassica and Arabidopsis, revealing features of conserved AS events.  Many of the conserved AS events may have important, but uncharacterized, functions.