Environmental Pollutant PCB 153 Is Associated with Candidate Alternative Splicing Alterations in Intellectual Disability-Associated Genes: An Exploratory RNA-Seq Splicing Analysis in a Neuronal Model

Description

Maria Lui and co-authors explore whether a lasting pollutant alters gene splicing in a neuron-like cell model, in a 2026 computational study. PCB 153 is among the most common polychlorinated biphenyls found in food and the environment. It was applied at a dose below cell-killing levels to differentiated SH-SY5Y cells. RNA sequencing data were reanalyzed for splicing changes rather than expression shifts.

The reanalysis flagged ninety candidate splicing events. It also flagged shifts in thirty-two genes encoding RNA-binding proteins, the regulators of the splicing machinery. Genes touched by the splicing changes overlapped with sets linked to intellectual disability and developmental conditions. Some retained-intron events were predicted to insert premature stop signals, which could destabilize the affected messages. Motif analysis named four binding proteins as likely regulators. The authors frame the work as hypothesis-generating, a mechanistic thread between the pollutant and neurodevelopmental harm.

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Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13300575