Downloaded from genome.cshlp.org on October 8, 2021 - Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press The dynamic landscape of fission yeast meiosis alternative- splice isoforms Zheng Kuang1,2, Jef D. Boeke1,2* and Stefan Canzar3,4* Affiliations 1Institute for Systems Genetics, NYU Langone Medical Center, New York City, NY 10016, USA 2Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, NYU Langone Medical Center, New York City, NY 10016, USA 3Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. 4Gene Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany. *Corresponding authors Contact: Jef D. Boeke:
[email protected] Stefan Canzar:
[email protected] Running title: Isoform landscape in fission yeast meiosis Keywords: alternative splicing, isoforms, fission yeast, meiosis, dynamic transcriptome 1 Downloaded from genome.cshlp.org on October 8, 2021 - Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press Abstract Alternative splicing increases the diversity of transcriptomes and proteomes in metazoans. The extent to which alternative splicing is active and functional in unicellular organisms is less understood. Here we exploit a single-molecule long-read sequencing technique and develop an open-source software program called SpliceHunter to characterize the transcriptome in the meiosis of fission yeast. We reveal 14353 alternative splicing events in 17669 novel isoforms at different stages of meiosis, including antisense and read-through transcripts. Intron retention is the major type of alternative splicing, followed by alternate “intron in exon”. 770 novel transcription units are detected; 53 of the predicted proteins show homology in other species and form theoretical stable structures. We report the complexity of alternative splicing along isoforms, including 683 intramolecularly co-associated intron pairs.