Editing Zebrafish (section)

====RNA splicing====
In 2015, researchers at [[Brown University]] discovered that 10% of zebrafish genes do not need to rely on the [[U2AF2]] [[protein]] to initiate [[RNA splicing]]. These genes have the DNA base pairs AC and TG as repeated sequences at the ends of each [[intron]]. On the 3'ss (3' splicing site), the base pairs [[adenine]] and [[cytosine]] alternate and repeat, and on the 5'ss (5' splicing site), their complements [[thymine]] and [[guanine]] alternate and repeat as well. They found that there was less reliance on U2AF2 protein than in humans, in which the protein is required for the splicing process to occur. The pattern of repeating base pairs around introns that alters RNA [[nucleic acid secondary structure|secondary structure]] was found in other [[teleost]]s, but not in [[tetrapod]]s. This indicates that an evolutionary change in tetrapods may have led to humans relying on the U2AF2 protein for RNA splicing while these genes in zebrafish undergo splicing regardless of the presence of the protein.<ref name="BrownRNA">{{cite journal |vauthors=Lin CL, Taggart AJ, Lim KH, Cygan KJ, Ferraris L, Creton R, Huang YT, Fairbrother WG |display-authors=6 |title=RNA structure replaces the need for U2AF2 in splicing |journal=Genome Research |volume=26 |issue=1 |pages=12–23 |date=January 2016 |pmid=26566657 |pmc=4691745 |doi=10.1101/gr.181008.114}}</ref>