Abstract
The differential production of transcript isoforms from gene loci is a key mechanism in multiple biological processes and pathologies. Although this has been exhaustively shown at RNA level, it remains elusive at protein level. Here, we describe a new pipeline ORQAS (ORF quantification pipeline for alternative splicing) for the translation quantification of individual transcript isoforms using ribosome-protected mRNA fragments (Ribosome profiling). We found evidence of translation for 40-50% of the expressed transcript isoforms in human and 50% in mouse, with 53% of the expressed genes having more than one translated isoform in human, and 33% in mouse. Differential analysis revealed that about 40% of the splicing changes measured at RNA level in human were concordant with changes in translation; and that 21.7% of changes measured at RNA level, and 17.8% at translation level, were conserved between human and mouse. Furthermore, orthologous cassette exons preserving the directionality of the change were found enriched in microexons in a comparison between glia and glioma in both, and were conserved between human and mouse.. In summary, we established a moderate but widespread impact of differential splicing in the translation of isoforms and found evidence of an impact on the translation of microexons as a consequence of differential splicing. ORQAS is available at https://github.com/comprna/orqas