Jimena Giudice, PhD, assistant professor in the UNC Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, and graduate students in the Curriculum in Genetics and Molecular Biology at UNC-Chapel Hill, co-authored a feature story on alternative splicing for The Scientist.
Jimena Giudice, PhD, assistant professor in the UNC Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, and graduate students in the Curriculum in Genetics and Molecular Biology at UNC-Chapel Hill, co-authored a feature story on alternative splicing for The Scientist.
In a feature in The Scientist titled, “Alternative Splicing Provides a Broad Menu of Proteins for Cells,” Jimena Giudice, PhD, assistant professor in the UNC Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, and graduate students in the Curriculum in Genetics and Molecular Biology at UNC-Chapel Hill, detail the history and complexity of alternative splicing in genetics research.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Seventeen years ago, the completion of the Human Genome Project revealed that there are around 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome—a puzzling result, given our intricate biology. Thanks to the advancement of large-scale proteomic studies over the decade following that milestone, researchers realized that some human cells contain billions of different polypeptides. Researchers realized that each gene can encode an array of proteins. The process of alternative splicing, which had first been observed 26 years before the Human Genome Project was finished, allows a cell to generate different RNAs, and ultimately different proteins, from the same gene. Since its discovery, it has become clear that alternative splicing is common and that the phenomenon helps explain how limited numbers of genes can encode organisms of staggering complexity. While fewer than 40 percent of the genes in a fruit fly undergo alternative splicing, more than 90 percent of genes are alternatively spliced in humans.”
The entire article can be read here. Giudice is a member of the UNC McAllister Heart Institute.