The recent explosion of publicly available high-throughput data is at least partially responsible for uniting the chromatin, non-coding RNA and alternative splicing fields. This became apparent in the Alternative Splicing – SIG satellite meeting at the recent Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB) in Boston, which Genome Biology attended

Public datasets analysed included ChIP-seq data from the lab of Keji Zhao. A mechanistic link between such histone modifications and splicing was explained by Reini Luco of Tom Misteli’s lab. Furthermore, it is not only the chromatin and splicing fields that were united at this meeting. Alternative splicing regulated by noncoding RNAs was also discussed by Eneritz Agirre and Mariano Allo. Again, progression was furthered by the analysis of a public RNA-seq dataset from the lab of Chris Burge. In addition, more ChIP-seq and RNA-seq datasets were presented at the meeting – mining such a wealth of data will only further our understanding of transcript regulation.