Best 25 Alternative Acceptor Sites: Drosophila Transformer

Pre-mRNAs of the Transformer (Tra) gene of Drosophila melanogaster undergo alternative splicing via the alternative acceptor site mode. The gene Tra encodes a protein that is expressed only in females. The primary transcript of this gene contains an intron with two possible acceptor sites.

Alternative acceptor site: An alternative 3' splice junction (acceptor site) is used, changing the 5' boundary of the downstream exon. Intron retention: A sequence may be spliced out as an intron or simply retained. This is distinguished from exon skipping because the retained sequence is not flanked by introns.

When they compared alternative splicing frequencies in random subsets of genes from each organism, the authors concluded that vertebrates do have higher rates of alternative splicing than invertebrates.

"Alternative splicing in concert with protein intrinsic disorder enables increased functional diversity in multicellular organisms". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 103 (22): 8390–5.