The research was conducted by scientists led by LI Ming from the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and published in Science Advances.

Splicing is a process in which RNA is cut and recombined into the final RNA strand that determines how a protein—encoded by DNA—is formed. Different splicing signals for the same RNA strand can generate protein isoforms that function differently.

The varied splicing signals may be generated by very small genetic variants in DNA—such as synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)—that alter a single nucleotide without changing the encoded amino acid sequence.