Candidates for tumor-specific alternative splicing

Gene expression can be regulated not only by transcription and post-transcriptional modifications, but also by splicing regulation. Recent genome-wide analyses have indicated that up to 70% of human genes may have alternatively spliced forms, suggesting that splicing regulation affects a wide range of gene expression. Tumor tissues show significantly altered protein expressions, and this is also thought to be affected by alternative splicing. Although some alternative splicing events have been reported to be cancer specific and others have been predicted from database analyses, the process of alternative splicing and its regulatory machinery are hardly understood. We searched for and detected alternative splicing events that alter protein splicing in all or a subset of tumor tissues. The results revealed tissue-specific alterations of splicing regulation by tumorigenesis, and regulatory cis-element analyses further suggested that multiple splicing regulatory machineries were affected by this process.