A Bioinformatic Analysis of Alternative Splicing Patterns in Metabolic Genes of Drosophila. Stacey J. Lytle¹, Alexis Nagengast². 1) Dept Biology; 2) Dept Biochemistry & Chemistry, Widener University, Chester, PA.

   Alternative splicing (AS) is a fundamental mechanism responsible for the creation of biological diversity. AS in the coding region of a gene results in proteins with functions specific for different tissues, sexes or stages of development. However, the consequence of AS in the 5 or 3 untranslated region (UTRs) is less understood. Using a bioinformatic approach and publically available gene models on FlyBase, AS patterns were investigated for genes of key metabolic processes including glycolysis, the citric acid cycle, and the pentose phosphate pathway in the Drosophila melanogaster species. AS in the 5 or 3 UTRs rather than coding regions appears to be a common pattern specific to each pathway. Many glycolytic genes are alternatively spliced in the 3 UTR while those in the pentose phosphate pathway are alternatively spliced primarily in the 5 UTR. Additionally, regions of high conservation at the nucleotide level were observed in these alternatively spliced UTRs. Further analysis will focus on using motif detection programs to identify areas of high conservation in the 5 and 3 UTR sequences. The alternatively spliced UTR sequences in D. melanogaster will be compared to orthologous sequences in other Drosophilid species to see if a shared regulatory mechanism may exist through the evolution of the species.