<i>N</i>-Ethyl-<i>N</i>-Nitrosourea (ENU) Mutagenesis Reveals an Intronic Residue Critical for<i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i>3′ Splice Site Function<i>in Vivo</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metazoan introns contain a polypyrimidine tract immediately upstream of the AG dinucleotide that defines the 3' splice site. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, 3' splice sites are characterized by a highly conserved UUUUCAG/R octamer motif. While the conservation of pyrimidines in this motif is strongly suggestive of their importance in pre-mRNA splicing, in vivo evidence in support of this is lacking. In an N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea (ENU) mutagenesis screen in Caenorhabditis elegans, we have isolated a strain containing a point mutation in the octamer motif of a 3' splice site in the daf-12 gene. This mutation, a single base T-to-G transversion at the -5 position relative to the splice site, causes a strong daf-12 loss-of-function phenotype by abrogating splicing. The resulting transcript is predicted to encode a truncated DAF-12 protein generated by translation into the retained intron, which contains an in-frame stop codon. Other than the perfectly conserved AG dinucleotide at the site of splicing, G at the -5 position of the octamer motif is the most uncommon base in C. elegans 3' splice sites, occurring at closely paired sites where the better match to the splicing consensus is a few bases downstream. Our results highlight both the biological importance of the highly conserved -5 uridine residue in the C. elegans 3' splice site octamer motif as well as the utility of using ENU as a mutagen to study the function of polypyrimidine tracts and other AU- or AT-rich motifs in vivo.
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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".