I was asked the other day if I could explain our research in 45 seconds, and after fumbling about with cumbersome nuggets such as ‘post-transcriptional mechanism’ and ‘spliceosome‘ and ‘exon-intron junctions’ decided it probably needed a drastic change of tact!
Anyway, it struck me that one of the key things to get across about alternative splicing is how important the inclusion (or exclusion) of an exon in a pre-mRNA has on how the mRNA is read or interpreted. If you substitute reading RNA messages with English grammar it reminds me of a funny Panda-related sentence that Hugh introduced me to a while back. It emphasises just how important a comma (or alternate exon, for example) has on the whole interpretation of the message. Compare these two sentences describing Pandas:
Eats shoots and leaves OR Eats, shoots and leaves
Notice how the comma completely changes the whole meaning and interpretation of the statement.
I think that this could be a good way to try to put across the key feature of splicing. Can it be done in 45 secs? Watch this space!
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