Comparative landscape of alternative splicing in fruit plants

Alternative splicing (AS) has played a major role in defining the protein diversity, which could be linked to phenotypic alternations. It is imperative to have a comparative resolution of AS to understand the pre-mRNAs splicing diversity. In the present research, we present a comparative assessment of the AS events in four different fruit plants including apple (Malus domestica), grape (Vitis vinifera), sweet orange (Citrus sinensis), and woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca), using spliced mapping of the expressed sequence tags and mRNA sequences. We identified a total of 2039 AS events in apple, 2454 in grape, 1425 in orange, and 631 in strawberry, respectively. In this study grape displayed the maximum number of genes (1588) associated with the splicing, followed by apple (1580), orange (1133) and strawberry (444). Transcripts mapping analysis shows that grape plant has relatively larger intron sizes than introns in other fruit species. The data provide a basis for further functional characterization of the genes undergoing AS and can be accessed at Plant Alternative Splicing Database (http://proteomics.ysu.edu/altsplice/plant/).