Alternative splicing is prevalent in the mammalian brain. To interrogate the functional role of alternative splicing in neural development, we analyzed purified neural progenitor cells (NPCs) and neurons from developing cerebral cortices, revealing hundreds of differentially spliced exons that preferentially alter key protein domains-especially in cytoskeletal proteins-and can harbor disease-causing mutations. We show that Ptbp1 and Rbfox proteins antagonistically govern the NPC-to-neuron transition by regulating neuron-specific exons. Whereas Ptbp1 maintains apical progenitors partly through suppressing a poison exon of Flna in NPCs, Rbfox proteins promote neuronal differentiation by switching Ninein from a centrosomal splice form in NPCs to a non-centrosomal isoform in neurons. We further uncover an intronic human mutation within a PTBP1-binding site that disrupts normal skipping of the FLNA poison exon in NPCs and causes a brain-specific malformation. Our study indicates that dynamic control of alternative splicing governs cell fate in cerebral cortical development.
Cell-Type-Specific Alternative Splicing Governs Cell Fate in the Developing Cerebral Cortex.
Xiaochang Zhang,M. Chen,Xuebing Wu,Andrew Kodani,Jean Fan,Ryan N. Doan,M. Ozawa,Jacqueline Ma,N. Yoshida,Jeremy F. Reiter,D. Black,P. Kharchenko,P. Sharp,C. Walsh
Published 2016 in Cell
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- Publication year
2016
- Venue
Cell
- Publication date
2016-08-01
- Fields of study
Biology, Medicine
- Identifiers
- External record
- Source metadata
Semantic Scholar, PubMed
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