Genome-wide identification of cancer-specific alternative splicing in circRNA

Circular RNA (circRNA) is a group of RNA families generated by RNA circularization, which was discovered ubiquitously across different cancers. However, the internal structure of circRNA is difficult to determine due to alternative splicing that occurs in its exons and introns. Furthermore, cancer-specific alternative splicing of circRNA is less likely to be identified. Here, we proposed a de novo algorithm, CircSplice, that could identify internal alternative splicing in circRNA and compare differential circRNA splicing events between different conditions (http://gb.whu.edu.cn/CircSplice or https://github.com/GeneFeng/CircSplice). By applying CircSplice in clear cell renal cell carcinoma and bladder cancer, we detected 4498 and 2977 circRNA alternative splicing (circ-AS) events in the two datasets respectively and confirmed the expression of circ-AS events by RT-PCR. We further inspected the distributions and patterns of circ-AS in cancer and adjacent normal tissues. To further understand the potential functions of cancer-specific circ-AS, we classified those events into tumor suppressors and oncogenes and performed pathway enrichment analysis. This study is the first comprehensive view of cancer-specific circRNA alternative splicing, which could contribute significantly to regulation and functional research of circRNAs in cancers. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12943-019-0996-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.