TY - JOUR T1 - Splicing factor Rbm10 facilitates heterochromatin assembly in fission yeast JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/518936 SP - 518936 AU - Martina Weigt AU - Qingsong Gao AU - Hyoju Ban AU - Haijin He AU - Guido Mastrobuoni AU - Stefan Kempa AU - Wei Chen AU - Fei Li Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/11/518936.abstract N2 - Splicing factors have recently been shown to be involved in heterochromatin formation, but their role in controlling heterochromatin structure and function remains poorly understood. In this study, we identified a fission yeast homologue of human splicing factor RBM10, which has been linked to TARP syndrome. Overexpression of Rbm10 in fission yeast leads to strong global intron retention. Rbm10 also interacts with splicing factors in a pattern resembling that of human RBM10, suggesting that the function of Rbm10 as a splicing regulator is conserved. Surprisingly, our deep-sequencing data showed that deletion of Rbm10 caused only minor effect on genome-wide gene expression and splicing. However, the mutant displays severe heterochromatin defects. Further analyses confirmed that the heterochromatin defects in the mutant did not result from mis-splicing of heterochromatin factors. Our proteomic data revealed that Rbm10 associates with the histone deacetylase Clr6 complex and chromatin remodeling complexes known to be essential for heterochromatin silencing. Our work together with previous findings further suggests that different splicing subunits may play distinct roles in heterochromatin regulation. ER -