Transcription Rate Strongly Affects Splicing Fidelity and Co-transcriptionality in Budding Yeast

The functional consequences for alternative splicing of altering the transcription rate have been the subject of intensive study in mammalian cells but less is known about effects on splicing of changing the transcription rate in yeast. We present several lines of evidence showing that slow RNA polymerase II elongation increases both co-transcriptional splicing and splicing efficiency and faster elongation reduces co transcriptional splicing and splicing efficiency in budding yeast, suggesting that splicing is more efficient when co-transcriptional. Moreover, we demonstrate that altering RNA polymerase II elongation rate in either direction compromises splicing fidelity, and we reveal that splicing fidelity depends largely on intron length together with secondary structure and splice site score. These effects are notably stronger for the highly expressed ribosomal protein coding transcripts. We propose that transcription by RNA polymerase II is tuned to optimise the efficiency and accuracy of ribosomal protein gene expression, while allowing flexibility in splice site choice with the nonribosomal protein transcripts. Overall design: Examination of pre-mRNA splicing in RNAPII elongation mutants. All experiments were performed in duplicate.

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Aslanzadeh V, Huang Y, Sanguinetti G, Beggs JD