ANOSVA: a statistical method for detecting splice variation from expression data

Abstract

Motivation: Many or most mammalian genes undergo alternative splicing, generating a variety of transcripts from a single gene. New information on splice variation is becoming available through technology for measuring expression levels of several exons or splice junctions per gene. We have developed a statistical method, ANalysis Of Splice VAriation (ANOSVA) to detect alternative splicing from expression data. Since ANOSVA requires no transcript information, it can be applied when the level of annotation is poor. When validated against spiked clone data, it generated no false positives and few false negatives. We demonstrated ANOSVA with data from a prototype mouse alternative splicing array, run against normal adult tissues, yielding a set of genes with evidence of tissue-specific splice variation. Availability: The results are available at the supplementary information site. Contact:cline@pasteur.fr Supplementary information: The results are available at the supplementary information site https://bioinfo.affymetrix.com/Papers/ANOSVA/