Almost 20 years after the discovery of introns and RNA splicing, a second spliceosome was uncovered: U12 snRNA-dependent spliceosome. It mediates the excision of a minor class of evolutionarily conserved introns (U12 introns) that have non-canonical consensus sequences. They can be distinguished from U2 introns based on their donor splice site sequence, [GA]TATCCTTT, and branch point sequence, TTCCTT[GA]A[CT]. In this project we will try to find out novel U12 introns in the human genome. Starting from the predictions of U12-intron-flanking exons (made by Geneid_v1.2_u12 and SGP) we obtained predicted U12 introns. Then, after finding the nucleotide sequence of predicted U12-intron-flanking exons, a BLAST analysis was made to find matching or similar sequences in dbEST and 'nr' database. Finally, once BLAST output had been processed, we could annotate some new U12 introns.
