Fig. 1.

Conservation of rescue-ese sequences and distribution in vertebrates. (A) rescue-ese (17) motifs and the number of predicted ESE hexamers in mouse and Fugu that overlap with rescue-ese hexamers in human and the distribution of human rescue-ese hexamers in sets of orthologous human, mouse, and Fugu exons. The symbols + or - refer to significant increasing or decreasing, respectively, of FD gradient toward the respective splice site. No gradient (computed similarly as described in Table 4) is represented by 0. *, Conservation only in human and mouse; otherwise sign of gradient was conserved in all three organisms. (B) As an example, the FD plots for hexamers of rescue-ese class 5C3D are shown as a function of distance from the 3′ss (Left) or 5′ss (Right) of orthologous exons in human, mouse, and Fugu. Each point represents the start of a 10-bp window. Values are plotted at 3-bp intervals. Black bars show SEM (see Materials and Methods).