remaining 24 tissues (Figure 5c) identified a set of human tissues including the ovary, thyroid, breast, heart, bone, B-cell, uterus, lymph and colon that have 'generic' splicing patterns which are more similar to most other tissues. As expected, many of these tissues with generic splicing patterns overlap with the set of tissues that have low levels of AS (Figure 1). On the other hand, another group of tissues including the human brain, pancreas, liver and peripheral nervous system, have highly 'distinctive' splicing patterns that differ from most other tissues (Figure 5c). Many of these tissues were identified as having high proportions of AS in Figure 1. Taken together, these observations suggest that specific human tissues such as the brain, testis and liver, make more extensive use of AS in gene regulation and that these tissues have also diverged most from other tissues in the set of spliced isoforms they express. Although we are not aware of reliable, quantitative data on the relative abundance of different cell types in these tissues, a greater diversity of cell types is likely to contribute to higher SJD values for many of these tissues.
