Alternative Splicing: Associating Frequency with Isoforms

In the simplest model of protein production, a gene gives rise to a single protein; DNA is transcribed to form pre-mRNA, which is converted to mRNA by splicing or removing introns. The result is a chain of exons that is translated to form a protein. Alternative splicing of exons may result in the formation of multiple proteins from the same gene sequence. However, not all of these proteins may be functional. Thus, we ask whether we can predict and rank (in order of frequency of occurrence and functional importance) the set of possible proteins for a gene. Herein we describe a tool that predicts the relative frequencies of isoforms that can be produced from a given gene.