Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are the commonest hematologic malignancies in the elderly. Now, the accurate diagnosis of MDS still heavily relies on the experienced hematologists' morphological evaluation of peripheral blood and bone marrow cells. Therefore, it is urgent to develop more effective detection methods for MDS diagnosis. Aberrant splicing is strongly associated with MDS. Many RNA splicing-related genes have been found to mutate in around 50% of MDS patients, suggesting analysis of RNA splicing status should be used for diagnosis of MDS. It is reported that exons of mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase kinase 7 (MAP3K7) and zinc finger protein 91 (ZNF91) were skipped in MDS patients.
This inspired us of constructing sensors that fused the skipping exons into the plasmids containing reporter, which monitors the alteration of RNA splicing in cells. Our project provides a simple and effective method for early diagnosis and prediction of prognosis in MDS in the future.