Multiple choice

Which among the following modes of alternative splicing is the rarest mode in mammals?

  1. Mutually exclusive exons

  2. Intron retention

  3. Alternative acceptor site

  4. Exon skipping or cassette exon

  5. Alternative donor site
Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
B Correct answer
Explanation

A sequence may be spliced out as an intron or simply retained. This is distinguished from exon skipping because the retained sequence is not flanked by introns. If the retained intron is in the coding region, the intron must encode amino acids in frame with the neighboring exons, or a stop codon or a shift in the reading frame will cause the protein to be non-functional. This is the rarest mode in mammals.

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