Alternate Polyadenylation in Human mRNAs: A Large-Scale Analysis by EST Clustering

Abstract

Alternate polyadenylation is an important post-transcriptional regulatory process now open to large-scale analysis by use of cDNA databases. We clustered 164,000 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) into ∼15,000 groups and aligned each group to a putative mRNA 3′ end. By use of stringent criteria to discard artifactual mRNA extremities, clear evidence for alternate polyadenylation was obtained in 189 of the 1000 EST clusters studied. A number of previously unreported polyadenylation sites were identified, together with possible instances of tissue-specific differential polyadenylation. This study demonstrates that, besides quantitative aspects of gene expression, the distribution of alternate mRNA forms can be analyzed through EST sampling.