Noncanonical RNAs from transcripts of the Drosophila muscleblind gene.

It has become increasingly evident that eukaryotic cells produce RNA molecules from coding genes with constitutions other than those of typically spliced mRNA transcripts. Here we describe new cDNAs from the Drosophila melanogaster muscleblind (mbl ) locus that identify two such atypical RNA molecules: RNAs containing an incomplete exon 2 tandem repetition (mblE2E2#) or having exons with a different order compared to the corresponding genomic DNA (mblE2E3#E2#; exon scrambling). The existence of exon duplications and rearrangements in the genomic locus that might explain such cDNAs was ruled out by genomic Southern blotting and in silico analysis of the Drosophila genome sequence. The incomp…