Recruitment of the human TREX complex to mRNA during splicing

In yeast, the TREX complex contains the THO transcription elongation complex, which functions in direct co-transcriptional recruitment of the mRNA export proteins Sub2 and Yra1 to nascent transcripts. Here we report the identification of the human THO complex and show that it associates with spliced mRNA, but not with unspliced pre-mRNA in vitro. Transcription is not required for this recruitment. We also show that the human THO complex colocalizes with splicing factors in nuclear speckle domains in vivo. Considering that splicing occurs cotranscriptionally in humans, our data indicate that recruitment of the human TREX complex to spliced mRNA is not directly coupled to transcription, but is instead coupled to transcription indirectly through splicing.