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Seven hundred and ninety Drosophila melanogaster genes, alternatively spliced in coding regions were considered together with their Drosophila pseudoobscura orthologs. It was found that nucleotide substitutions in alternative coding regions accumulate more intensively than in constitutive regions. Moreover, the evolutionary pattern of alternative regions depends on their inclusion mechanisms (use of alternative promoters, splicing sites or polyadenylation sites) significantly. The rate of synonymous substitutions varies is more dramatically than that of nonsynonymous substitutions. Nucleotide substitution patterns in different classes of alternative regions of mammalian and Drosophila genes have little in common.

EDAS, a database of alternatively spliced human genes, contains data on the alignment of proteins, mRNAs, and EST. It contains information on all exons and introns observed, as well as elementary alternatives formed from them. The database makes it possible to filter the output data by changing the cut-off threshold by the significance level. The database is accessible at http://www.gene-bee.msu.ru/edas/.