Comparative analysis indicates that alternative splicing in plants has a limited role in functional expansion of the proteome

Table 1 Gene structure and AS predictions

	Arabidopsis		rice		poplar		maize
Gene predictions
Gene structures	36,373		60,431		17,573		173,277
Loci	25,383		39,252		15,676		140,903
Anchored
Gene structures	19,949		18,398		4,686		11,147
Loci	17,754		17,000		4,501		9,360
Loci with AS	4,338	24.4%	4,703	27.7%	542	12.0%	3,724	39.8%
AS event type *
AA	1,736	23.0%	1,577	16.5%	176	23.3%	1,589	19.1%
AD	932	12.4%	1,017	10.6%	92	12.2%	1,089	13.1%
AP	209	2.8%	590	6.2%	32	4.2%	391	4.7%
IR-CI	3,918	51.9%	4,972	51.9%	302	40.1%	4,072	48.9%
ES-CE	751	10.0%	1,428	14.9%	152	20.2%	1,178	14.2%
Total events	7,546		9,584		754		8,319

*AA: Alternative acceptor, AD: Alternative donor, AP: Alternative position, IR: Intron retention, CI: Cryptic introns, ES: Exon skipping, CE: Cryptic exons. The frequencies of the individual AS events are derived from a non-redundant set of AS relationships in which the reciprocal event types CI and IR, and ES and CE are grouped into the IR-CI and ES-CE classes, respectively.

ISSN: 1471-2164