ScanExitronLR: characterization and quantification of exitron splicing events in long-read RNA-seq data
- PMID: 36099042
- PMCID: PMC9620817
- DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac626
ScanExitronLR: characterization and quantification of exitron splicing events in long-read RNA-seq data
Abstract
Summary: Exitron splicing is a type of alternative splicing where coding sequences are spliced out. Recently, exitron splicing has been shown to increase proteome plasticity and play a role in cancer. Long-read RNA-seq is well suited for quantification and discovery of alternative splicing events; however, there are currently no tools available for the detection and annotation of exitrons in long-read RNA-seq data. Here, we present ScanExitronLR, an application for the characterization and quantification of exitron splicing events in long-reads. From a BAM alignment file, reference genome and reference gene annotation, ScanExitronLR outputs exitron events at the individual transcript level. Outputs of ScanExitronLR can be used in downstream analyses of differential exitron splicing. In addition, ScanExitronLR optionally reports exitron annotations such as truncation or frameshift type, nonsense-mediated decay status and Pfam domain interruptions. We demonstrate that ScanExitronLR performs better on noisy long-reads than currently published exitron detection algorithms designed for short-read data.
Availability and implementation: ScanExitronLR is freely available at https://github.com/ylab-hi/ScanExitronLR and distributed as a pip package on the Python Package Index.
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
Figures

Similar articles
-
Exitrons: offering new roles to retained introns-the novel regulators of protein diversity and utility.AoB Plants. 2024 Mar 20;16(2):plae014. doi: 10.1093/aobpla/plae014. eCollection 2024 Feb. AoB Plants. 2024. PMID: 38566894 Free PMC article. Review.
-
Read-Split-Run: an improved bioinformatics pipeline for identification of genome-wide non-canonical spliced regions using RNA-Seq data.BMC Genomics. 2016 Aug 22;17 Suppl 7(Suppl 7):503. doi: 10.1186/s12864-016-2896-7. BMC Genomics. 2016. PMID: 27556805 Free PMC article.
-
AS-Quant: Detection and Visualization of Alternative Splicing Events with RNA-seq Data.Int J Mol Sci. 2021 Apr 25;22(9):4468. doi: 10.3390/ijms22094468. Int J Mol Sci. 2021. PMID: 33922891 Free PMC article.
-
Unmasking alternative splicing inside protein-coding exons defines exitrons and their role in proteome plasticity.Genome Res. 2015 Jul;25(7):995-1007. doi: 10.1101/gr.186585.114. Epub 2015 May 1. Genome Res. 2015. PMID: 25934563 Free PMC article.
-
RNA sequencing: advances, challenges and opportunities.Nat Rev Genet. 2011 Feb;12(2):87-98. doi: 10.1038/nrg2934. Epub 2010 Dec 30. Nat Rev Genet. 2011. PMID: 21191423 Free PMC article. Review.
Cited by
-
DELongSeq for efficient detection of differential isoform expression from long-read RNA-seq data.NAR Genom Bioinform. 2023 Mar 3;5(1):lqad019. doi: 10.1093/nargab/lqad019. eCollection 2023 Mar. NAR Genom Bioinform. 2023. PMID: 36879902 Free PMC article.
-
Exitrons: offering new roles to retained introns-the novel regulators of protein diversity and utility.AoB Plants. 2024 Mar 20;16(2):plae014. doi: 10.1093/aobpla/plae014. eCollection 2024 Feb. AoB Plants. 2024. PMID: 38566894 Free PMC article. Review.
-
Computational methods for alternative polyadenylation and splicing in post-transcriptional gene regulation.Exp Mol Med. 2025 Aug;57(8):1631-1640. doi: 10.1038/s12276-025-01496-z. Epub 2025 Aug 14. Exp Mol Med. 2025. PMID: 40804481 Free PMC article. Review.
References
-
- Cecchini N.M. et al. (2022) Alternative splicing of an exitron determines the subnuclear localization of the Arabidopsis DNA-glycosylase MBD4L under heat stress. Plant J. Cell Mol. Biol., 110, 377–388. - PubMed
-
- , Chen Y. et al. (2021) A systematic benchmark of Nanopore long read RNA sequencing for transcript level analysis in human cell lines. bioRxiv, 2021.04.21.440736. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.21.440736.
-
- Cheng Q. et al. (2020) Conserved exitrons of FLAGELLIN-SENSING 2 (FLS2) across dicot plants and their functions. Plant Sci. Int. J. Exp. Plant Biol., 296, 110507. - PubMed
Publication types
MeSH terms
Grants and funding
LinkOut - more resources
Full Text Sources
Miscellaneous