Children's consent and paediatric research: is it appropriate for healthy children to be the decision-makers in clinical research?
New guidance about the requirements for informed consent involving children in research is needed, which can respect the autonomy of the child and the role of the parent, while recognising the limited capacity of some children to understand age-appropriate information.
This study extends the range of plant taxa shown to have high levels of AS, confirms the importance of intron retention in plants, and demonstrates the utility of using ESTs from related species in order to identify novel and conserved AS events. The results also indicate that the frequency of AS in plants is comparable to that observed in mammals. Finally, our results highlight the importance of normalizing EST levels when estimating the frequency of alternative splicing.