Correspondence of D. melanogaster and C. elegans developmental stages revealed by alternative splicing characteristics of conserved exons.

Our results suggest that AS dynamics of the exon pairs that share similar DNA sequences are informative for finding transcriptomic similarity of biological samples. Our study is innovative in two aspects. First, to our knowledge, our study is the first comprehensive study of AS events in fly and worm developmental stages, tissues, and cells. AS events provide an alternative perspective of transcriptome dynamics, compared to gene expression events. Second, our results do not entirely rely on the information of orthologous genes. Interesting results are also observed for fly and worm cassette exon pairs with DNA sequence similarity but not in orthologous gene pairs.