The importance of alternative splicing in adaptive evolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although alternative splicing is a ubiquitous co-transcriptional gene regulatory mechanism in plants, animals and fungi, its contribution to evolutionary transitions is understudied. Alternative splicing enables different mRNA isoforms to be generated from the same gene, expanding transcriptomic and thus proteomic diversity. While the role of gene expression variation in adaptive evolution is widely accepted, biologists still debate the functional impact of alternative isoforms on phenotype. In light of recent empirical research linking splice variation to ecological adaptations, we propose that alternative splicing is an important substrate for adaptive evolution and speciation, particularly at short timescales. In this article we synthesise what is known about the role of alternative splicing in adaptive evolution. We discuss the contribution of standing splice variation to phenotypic plasticity and how hybridisation can produce novel splice forms. Going forwards, we propose that alternative splicing be included as a standard analysis alongside gene expression analysis so we can better understand of how alternative splicing contributes to adaptive divergence at the micro- and macroevolutionary levels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".