The photoreceptors express a splicing program that is distinct from the splicing profiles of CNS or other retinal neurons.

<p>Heatmap showing the relative inclusion levels of exons differentially spliced between the retina of wild type and Aipl(-/-) animals across a panel of mouse tissues. Exon inclusion levels can only be calculated if the transcript is expressed. Thus, exons in transcripts that are not expressed in the majority of the samples are not included in the heatmap. Missing data points are in white color. Unsupervised hierarchical clustering places retinal samples from Aipl1(-/-) mice along with the CNS samples, while the wild type retina samples form a separate cluster. Microexons with length of 30nt or less are annotated on the right. The red bar on the left shows a cluster of photoreceptor specific exons with “switch like” splicing pattern.