CHIMERA DATABASE

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Alfonso Valencia lab, CNIO

 

Chimeric RNAs of two or more different transcripts have been identified among the ESTs isolated from many organisms. However, how the machinery producing chimeras might have been used to design new functional proteins currently remains unclear. In humans, chimeric transcripts seem to produce proteins which integrate transmembrane domains and signal peptides from one of the proteins involved in chimera. By analyzing the thousands of chimeric ESTs by RNA sequencing, we found that the expression level of chimeric ESTs is generally low and they are highly tissue specific. Here we present adatabase of about 7,000 chimeric transcripts and more than 5,000 breakpoints with the expression levels of chimeric RNAs confirmed by the paired-end RNA-sequencing experiments in different tissues in humans. Supported by the Miguel Servet, Consolider, ENCODE grants.