Beautiful mechanistic story, how QKI by bridging intronic motifs with U6 snRNA ensures inclusion of weak 5’ splice sites that are essential for building sarcomeres. Congrats @kurianlab.bsky.social and @evannostrandlab.bsky.social labs & all involved.
Many conserved exons in the heart and brain utilize weak 5 ′ splice sites, yet they are accurately spliced. But how? We show that splicing fidelity is actively enforced through a QKI-U6 checkpoint at the U1→U6 handover in essential cardiac genes during organogenesis.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
During organogenesis, precise pre-mRNA splicing is essential to assemble tissue architecture. Many developmentally essential exons bear weak 5'splice sites (5'SS) yet are spliced with high precision, ...
