“Widespread intron retention in mammals functionally tunes tanscriptomes”. Ulrich Braunschweig

Intron retention (IR) is the least well understood class of alternative splicing (AS) of precursor RNAs. Despite it represents the least prevalent form of AS in animals, it is quite frequent in mammals. It seems to be most frequent in poorly expressed genes and to affect genes with “inappropriate” functions, such as genes down-regulated in a given tissue. The results showed by Ulrich Braunschweig suggest that IR could act to reduce the level of transcripts that are less or not required within a specific cell or tissue.