Selection preserves Ubiquitin Specific Protease 4 alternative exon skipping in therian mammals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ubiquitin specific protease 4 (USP4) is a highly networked deubiquitinating enzyme with reported roles in cancer, innate immunity and RNA splicing. In mammals it has two dominant isoforms arising from inclusion or skipping of exon 7 (E7). We evaluated two plausible mechanisms for the generation of these isoforms: (A) E7 skipping due to a long upstream intron and (B) E7 skipping due to inefficient 5' splice sites (5'SS) and/or branchpoint sites (BPS). We then assessed whether E7 alternative splicing is maintained by selective pressure or arose from genetic drift. Both transcript variants were generated from a USP4-E7 minigene construct with short flanking introns, an observation consistent with the second mechanism whereby differential splice signal strengths are the basis of E7 skipping. Optimization of the downstream 5'SS eliminated E7 skipping. Experimental validation of the correlation between 5'SS identity and exon skipping in vertebrates pinpointed the +6 site as the key splicing determinant. Therian mammals invariably display a 5'SS configuration favouring alternative splicing and the resulting isoforms have distinct subcellular localizations. We conclude that alternative splicing of mammalian USP4 is under selective maintenance and that long and short USP4 isoforms may target substrates in various cellular compartments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".