Format: ORAL

Jordyn Coutts1, Craig I. Dent1, Angus Burns1, Chaaya Atri1, Nawar Shamaya1, Sridevi Sureshkumar1, John Bowman1, Sureshkumar Balasubramanian1

1 School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, VIC 3800, AUSTRALIA

Splicing is an important gene regulatory process. Alternative splicing can lead to varied proteins being produced and can also alter gene expression levels. Alternative splicing can be seen during development and in response to changes in environmental cues, allowing plants to display developmental and phenotypic plasticity in response to abiotic stress. The regulation of alternative splicing evolved with increasing complexity as plants diversified, particularly as genomes duplicated. This has resulted in an amplification of splicing genes such as SR proteins. As a result, it is difficult to study splicing regulators due to functional redundancy. The bryophyte Marchantia polymorpha gives us a chance to untangle the regulatory mechanisms of alternative splicing, due to its low genomic duplication. We use the CRISPR Cas9 mutagenesis system and in-house bioinformatics tools of splicing measurements to uncover the targets of splicing factors and define splicing specificity. Comparisons of splicing in different species provides evolutionary insights on splicing specificity.