| Abstract: |
According to recent several reports, the number of human genes
is estimated fewer than 40,000, which, surprisingly, is only double the
number (19,000) present in Caenorhabditis elegans. This fact indicates that
the correlation between complexity of a species and its gene number appears
to be loose, motivating studies on other sources of complexity such as alternatively
splicing and cis-regulatory machinery. The first step towards this research
direction would be to list candidates of alternatively spliced transcripts
and promoters. Because of the release and updates of the human genome, this
enumeration could be achieved by aligning millions of expressed sequence
tags (ESTs, for short) to a draft human genome and then organizing alignments
into related groups, which is however computationally costly. We have developed
an efficient algorithm for this purpose, taking only one day to align three
millions of ESTs to a newly revised draft genome from scratch. Analysis
of 2.2 millions of alignments identifies about 8,000 groups of alternatively
spliced transcripts. A typical group contains tens of alignments, demanding
a method of selecting representatives. All the results are accessible through
the WWW at our Gene Resource Locator web site http://grl.gi.k.u-tokyo.ac.jp/
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