An illuminated view of molecular biology

Everything is Illuminated, Liev Schreiber's 2005 directorial debut, is a charming offbeat movie about a young man on a self-driven quest in a foreign land. Through his journey, he finds connections between past and present and between things that initially appear completely unrelated. Both the title and the unifying theme of the movie match current trends and advances in molecular biology well. Like the character in the film, researchers meticulously collect information using newly developed high-throughput and high-resolution technologies. And as they work to make sense of these new findings, unifying themes begin to emerge. At the recent International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and the associated Special Interest Group meeting on Alternative Splicing in Boston, attendees were treated to talks covering diverse topics that, when taken together, offered a glimpse of the interconnectedness of traditionally separate fields in molecular biology and the ever-improving tools available to study them. Here we present a few of the highlights of the meetings.At the level of the transcriptome, evidence is accumulating about the physical and regulatory coupling between RNA splicing and nucleosome positioning, histone modifications and non-coding RNAs. Nature does not seem to follow the human-contrived definitions that separate biological processes or research fields, and building a unified model of the transcriptome requires combining information from different fields. Addressing the question of the control of alternative RNA splicing, Reini Luco (National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA) described how the trimethylation of lysine 36 on histone H3 (H3K36me3) can change the pattern of alternative exon inclusion. By studying alternative exons within the human fibroblast growth factor receptor 2 (FGFR2) and several other human genes, Luco and colleagues found that modulation of the expression levels of the H3K36 methyltra