Spatio-temporal reconstruction of gene expression patterns in developing mice

Spliceosome complex and neurodevelopmental disorders

Neurodevelopment requires complex spatiotemporal expression, which heavily relies on proper RNA splicing. The spliceosome is a ribonucleoprotein complex that removes introns from pre-mRNA, joins exons, and produces mature mRNA. Pathogenic variants in genes that code for spliceosome RNAs and proteins cause RNA mis-splicing and spliceosomopathies. Splicing defects during nervous system development upend the tightly controlled neurodevelopmental process, leading to neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs). Despite the fact that the spliceosome is expressed in every cell, not all spliceosomopathies present as NDDs; spliceosomopathies are often tissue-specific in that a variant has a greater impact on certain cell lineages or cell types. Here we discuss spliceosomopathies whose presentations include NDDs and focus on spliceosome-coding genes.

The people behind the papers - Laura Aviñó-Esteban and James Sharpe

It can be challenging to understand the dynamics of gene expression patterns when embryos develop inside a uterus, making it impossible to image changes to gene expression in real time. A new paper in Development presents a pipeline where images of mouse embryos at discrete developmental timepoints can be used to reconstruct a continuous description of gene expression changes over time. To learn more about the story behind the paper, we caught up with first author Laura Aviñó-Esteban and corresponding author James Sharpe, Head of EMBL Barcelona, Spain.