50/50 Expressional Odds of Retention Signifies the Distinction between Retained Introns and Constitutively Spliced Introns in Arabidopsis thaliana

Intron retention, one of the most prevalent alternative splicing events in plants, can lead to introns retained in mature mRNAs. However, in comparison with constitutively spliced introns (CSIs), the relevantly distinguishable features for retained introns (RIs) are still poorly understood. This work proposes a computational pipeline to discover novel RIs from multiple next-generation RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) datasets of Arabidopsis thaliana. Using this pipeline, we detected 3,472 novel RIs from 18 RNA-Seq datasets and re-confirmed 1,384 RIs which are currently annotated in the TAIR10 database. We also use the expression of intron-containing isoforms as a new feature in addition to the conventional features. Based on these features, RIs are highly distinguishable from CSIs by machine learning methods, especially when the expressional odds of retention (i.e., the expression ratio of the RI-containing isoforms relative to the isoforms without RIs for the same gene) reaches to or larger than 50/50. In this case, the RIs and CSIs can be clearly separated by the Random Forest with an outstanding performance of 0.95 on AUC (the area under a receiver operating characteristics curve). The closely related characteristics to the RIs include the low strength of splice sites, high similarity with the flanking exon sequences, low occurrence percentage of YTRAY near the acceptor site, existence of putative intronic splicing silencers (ISSs, i.e., AG/GA-rich motifs) and intronic splicing enhancers (ISEs, i.e., TTTT-containing motifs), and enrichment of Serine/Arginine-Rich (SR) proteins and heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoparticle proteins (hnRNPs).