Evolutionary trends of alternative splicing

Alternative splicing is the post-transcriptional mechanism by which many different isoforms are generated from a single gene, contributing to increasing spatio-temporal transcriptome complexity. We propose a novel genome-level measure of alternative splicing, which associates it with a single value for each species. Thus, a comparative analysis of species spanning the whole tree of life has revealed certain evolutionary trends in alternative splicing, prevalence in specific lineages, and relation to genome compositional structures.