Exon trapping is a molecular biology

Molecular biology

Molecular biology is the branch of biology that deals with the molecular basis of biological activity. This field overlaps with other areas of biology and chemistry, particularly genetics and biochemistry...

 technique to identify potential exons in a fragment of eukaryote

Eukaryote

A eukaryote is an organism whose cells contain complex structures enclosed within membranes. Eukaryotes may more formally be referred to as the taxon Eukarya or Eukaryota. The defining membrane-bound structure that sets eukaryotic cells apart from prokaryotic cells is the nucleus, or nuclear...

 DNA

DNA

Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...

 of unknown intron

Intron

An intron is any nucleotide sequence within a gene that is removed by RNA splicing to generate the final mature RNA product of a gene. The term intron refers to both the DNA sequence within a gene, and the corresponding sequence in RNA transcripts. Sequences that are joined together in the final...

-exon

Exon

An exon is a nucleic acid sequence that is represented in the mature form of an RNA molecule either after portions of a precursor RNA have been removed by cis-splicing or when two or more precursor RNA molecules have been ligated by trans-splicing. The mature RNA molecule can be a messenger RNA...

 structure. This is done to determine if the fragment is part of an expressed gene

Gene

A gene is a molecular unit of heredity of a living organism. It is a name given to some stretches of DNA and RNA that code for a type of protein or for an RNA chain that has a function in the organism. Living beings depend on genes, as they specify all proteins and functional RNA chains...

.

The genomic fragment is inserted into the intron of a 'splicing vector

Vector (molecular biology)

In molecular biology, a vector is a DNA molecule used as a vehicle to transfer foreign genetic material into another cell. The four major types of vectors are plasmids, viruses, cosmids, and artificial chromosomes...

' consisting of a known exon - intron - exon sequence of DNA. 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 mature mRNA after transcription (with all intron material removed). The presence of 'trapped exons' can be detected by an increase in size of the mRNA.

The technique has largely been supplanted by the approach of sequencing

DNA sequencing

DNA sequencing includes several methods and technologies that are used for determining the order of the nucleotide bases—adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine—in a molecule of DNA....

 cDNA generated from mRNA and then using bioinformatics tools such as NCBI

National Center for Biotechnology Information

The National Center for Biotechnology Information is part of the United States National Library of Medicine , a branch of the National Institutes of Health. The NCBI is located in Bethesda, Maryland and was founded in 1988 through legislation sponsored by Senator Claude Pepper...

's BLAST

BLAST

In bioinformatics, Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, or BLAST, is an algorithm for comparing primary biological sequence information, such as the amino-acid sequences of different proteins or the nucleotides of DNA sequences...

server to determine the source of the sequence, thereby identifying the appropriate exon-intron splice sites.