How active is the spliceosome in generating phenotypes? I don’t know if the question pertains really to cellular differentiation to variance in protein expression, but more or less is the spliceosome has any direct impact on appearance of traits and or phenotypes.

 

Simply put if it did could the spliceosome be used to study phylogeny in an ecological sense using epigenetics?

 

Last question which I have to add in case someone knows it, does the spliceosome play any direct role when populations of locusts form?

yes, definitely. There's a nice section in my biochem textbook explaining how alternate mRNA splicing leads to different gene products.

This is particularly useful for splicing together tissue specific introns.

 

Some good examples to look up would the be alpha-tropomyosin gene and the Drosophila DSCAM protein.