Section: New Results

Chimeric transcripts in Eukaryotes

In the framework of the extension of the ENCODE project to chromosomes 21 and 22, we had the opportunity to identify a new category of transcripts, which we call chimeric transcripts, since they contain exons from different genes, which can themselves be located far apart on the same chromosome, or on different chromosomes [9] . We further found that the network formed by these connected genes is enriched in cliques of sizes 3 and 4, which seems to indicate that transcription and/or splicing of these sets of genes co-occur in time and space, as is confirmed by the confrontation of our expression dataset to a dataset indicating the co-localisation of DNA fragments in 3D. This work was done in collaboration with, among others, R. Guigó.