Assaying the Effects of Splice Site Variants by Exon Trapping in a Mammalian Cell Line

There are several in silico programs that endeavor to predict the functional impact of an individual's sequence variation at splice donor/acceptor sites, but experimental confirmation is problematic without a source of RNA from the individual that carries the variant. With the aid of an exon trapping vector, such as pSPL3, an investigator can test whether a splice site sequence change leads to altered RNA splicing, through expression of reference and variant mini-genes in mammalian cells and analysis of the resultant RNA products.