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Exon trapping is amolecular biology technique to identify potentialexons in a fragment ofeukaryoteDNA of unknownintron-exon structure.[1] This is done to determine if the fragment is part of an expressedgene.
The genomic fragment is inserted into the intron of a 'splicingvector' consisting of a known exon - intron - exon sequence of DNA, and the vector is then inserted into a eukaryotic cell. If the fragment does not contain exons (i.e., consists solely of intron DNA), it will be spliced out together with the vector's original intron. On the other hand, if exons are contained, they will be part of the maturemRNA after transcription (with all intron material removed). The presence of 'trapped exons' can be detected by an increase in size of the mRNA, or throughRT-PCR to amplify the DNA of interest.
The technique has largely been supplanted by the approach ofsequencingcDNA generated frommRNA and then using bioinformatics tools such asNCBI'sBLAST server to determine the source of the sequence, thereby identifying the appropriate exon-intron splice sites.