The recent explosion of publicly available high-throughput data is at least partially responsible for uniting the chromatin, non-coding RNA and alternative splicing fields. This became apparent in theAlternative Splicing – SIGsatellite meeting at the recent Annual International Conference onIntelligent Systems in Molecular Biology(ISMB) in Boston, whichGenome Biologyattended

Public datasets analysed includedChIP-seqdata from the lab of Keji Zhao. Amechanistic linkbetween such histone modifications and splicing was explained by Reini Luco of Tom Misteli’s lab. Furthermore, it is not only the chromatin and splicing fields that were united at this meeting. Alternative splicing regulated bynoncoding RNAswas also discussed by Eneritz Agirre and Mariano Allo. Again, progression was furthered by the analysis of a publicRNA-seqdataset from the lab of Chris Burge. In addition, more ChIP-seq and RNA-seq datasets were presented at the meeting – mining such a wealth of data will only further our understanding of transcript regulation.