Intricate combinatorial patterns of exon splicing generate multiple regulated troponin T isoforms from a single gene.

Mechanisms of alternative RNA splicing, important in the generation of protein diversity, are common but incompletely understood. Among the contractile proteins, troponin T exists in several isoforms, shown to be derived in part from a novel pattern of differential RNA splicing in the 3' region of the rat skeletal fast troponin T gene. In fact, this gene has a previously unsuspected capacity to encode multiple isoforms. The isolation of four distinct but related cDNAs from this gene, which share discontinuous subsegments of sequence identity in their 5' regions, and the determination of the genomic sequence, demonstrate that small exons with characteristic split codon structure are differentially spliced in intricate combinatorial patterns to generate a minimum of 10, and potentially 64, distinct troponin T mRNAs, encoding different isoforms, in a developmentally regulated and tissue-specific manner. At least two of these mRNAs are spliced from structurally identical primary transcripts, necessitating control by trans-acting factors.