Timing is everything: advances in quantifying splicing kinetics

Splicing is a highly regulated process critical for proper pre-mRNA maturation and the maintenance of a healthy cellular environment. Splicing events are impacted by ongoing transcription, neighboring splicing events, and cis and trans regulatory factors on the respective pre-mRNA transcript. Within this complex regulatory environment, splicing kinetics have the potential to influence splicing outcomes but have historically been challenging to study in vivo. In this review, we highlight recent technological advancements that have enabled measurements of global splicing kinetics and of the variability of splicing kinetics at single introns. We demonstrate how identifying features that are correlated with splicing kinetics has increased our ability to form potential models for how splicing kinetics may be regulated in vivo.

Transcription and splicing dynamics during early Drosophila development

Widespread cotranscriptional splicing has been demonstrated from yeast to human. However, most studies to date addressing the kinetics of splicing relative to transcription used either Saccharomyces cerevisiae or metazoan cultured cell lines. Here, we adapted native elongating transcript sequencing technology (NET-seq) to measure cotranscriptional splicing dynamics during the early developmental stages of Drosophila melanogaster embryos. Our results reveal the position of RNA polymerase II (Pol II) when both canonical and recursive splicing occur. We found heterogeneity in splicing dynamics, with some RNAs spliced immediately after intron transcription, whereas for other transcripts no splicing was observed over the first 100 nt of the downstream exon. Introns that show splicing completion before Pol II has reached the end of the downstream exon are necessarily intron-defined. We studied the splicing dynamics of both nascent pre-mRNAs transcribed in the early embryo, which have few and short introns, as well as pre-mRNAs transcribed later in embryonic development, which contain multiple long introns. As expected, we found a relationship between the proportion of spliced reads and intron size. However, intron definition was observed at all intron sizes. We further observed that genes transcribed in the early embryo tend to be isolated in the genome whereas genes transcribed later are often overlapped by a neighboring convergent gene. In isolated genes, transcription termination occurred soon after the polyadenylation site, while in overlapped genes, Pol II persisted associated with the DNA template after cleavage and polyadenylation of the nascent transcript. Taken together, our data unravel novel dynamic features of Pol II transcription and splicing in the developing Drosophila embryo.

POINT technology illuminates the processing of polymerase-associated intact nascent transcripts

Mammalian chromatin is the site of both RNA polymerase II (Pol II) transcription and coupled RNA processing. However, molecular details of such co-transcriptional mechanisms remain obscure, partly because of technical limitations in purifying authentic nascent transcripts. We present a new approach to characterize nascent RNA, called polymerase intact nascent transcript (POINT) technology. This three-pronged methodology maps nascent RNA 5′ ends (POINT-5), establishes the kinetics of co-transcriptional splicing patterns (POINT-nano), and profiles whole transcription units (POINT-seq). In particular, we show by depletion of the nuclear exonuclease Xrn2 that this activity acts selectively on cleaved 5′ P-RNA at polyadenylation sites. Furthermore, POINT-nano reveals that co-transcriptional splicing either occurs immediately after splice site transcription or is delayed until Pol II transcribes downstream sequences. Finally, we connect RNA cleavage and splicing with either premature or full-length transcript termination. We anticipate that POINT technology will afford full dissection of the complexity of co-transcriptional RNA processing.

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POINT methodology dissects intact nascent RNA processing

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Specificity of Xrn2 exonuclease in co-transcriptional RNA degradation

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Splicing suppresses Xrn2-dependent premature termination

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Different kinetic classes of co-transcriptional splicing in human genes

Extremely fast and incredibly close: cotranscriptional splicing in budding yeast

RNA splicing, an essential part of eukaryotic pre-messenger RNA processing, can be simultaneous with transcription by RNA polymerase II. Here, we compare and review independent next-generation sequencing methods that jointly quantify transcription and splicing in budding yeast. For many yeast transcripts, splicing is fast, taking place within seconds of intron transcription, while polymerase is within a few dozens of nucleotides of the 3' splice site. Ribosomal protein transcripts are spliced particularly fast and cotranscriptionally. However, some transcripts are spliced inefficiently or mainly post-transcriptionally. Intron-mediated regulation of some genes is likely to be cotranscriptional. We suggest that intermediates of the splicing reaction, missing from current data sets, may hold key information about splicing kinetics.

Splicing kinetics and transcript release from the chromatin compartment limit the rate of Lipid A-induced gene expression

The expression of eukaryotic mRNAs is achieved though an intricate series of molecular processes that provide many steps for regulating the production of a final gene product. However, the relationships between individual steps in mRNA biosynthesis and the rates at which they occur are poorly understood. By applying RNA-seq to chromatin-associated and soluble nucleoplasmic fractions of RNA from Lipid A-stimulated macrophages, we examined the timing of exon ligation and transcript release from chromatin relative to the induction of transcription. We find that for a subset of genes in the Lipid A response, the ligation of certain exon pairs is delayed relative to the synthesis of the complete transcript. In contrast, 3' end cleavage and polyadenylation occur rapidly once transcription extends through the cleavage site. Our data indicate that these transcripts with delayed splicing are not released from the chromatin fraction until all the introns have been excised. These unusual kinetics result in a chromatin-associated pool of completely transcribed and 3'-processed transcripts that are not yet fully spliced. We also find that long introns containing repressed exons that will be excluded from the final mRNA are excised particularly slowly relative to other introns in a transcript. These results indicate that the kinetics of splicing and transcript release contribute to the timing of expression for multiple genes of the inflammatory response.