Small changes in ambient temperature affect alternative splicing in Arabidopsis thaliana

Alternative splicing (AS) gives rise to multiple mRNA isoforms from the same gene, providing possibilities to reg-ulate gene expression beyond the level of transcription. In a recent paper in Nucleic Acids Research we used a high resolution RT-PCR based panel to study changes in AS patterns in plants with altered levels of an hnRNP-like RNA-binding protein in Arabidopsis thaliana. Furthermore, we detected significant changes in AS pat-terns between different Arabidopsis eco-types. Here we investigated how small changes in ambient temperature affect AS. We found significant changes in AS for 12 of 28 investigated events (43%) upon transfer of Arabidopsis plants from 20°C to 16°C and for 6 of the 28 inves-tigated events (21%) upon transfer from 20°C to 24°C. © 2013 Landes Bioscience.