I’ve read a few studies where the authors aim to study the association of certain proteins to mRNA in a splicing-dependent manner. Mainly they compared samples containing spliced mRNA with cDNA-samples, in a way that to me seemed as if they insinuated that the cDNA samples represented the non-spliced samples. cDNA is, as far as I know, made from mature mRNA which is fully spliced?
cDNA is reverse transcribe from mature mRNA which only contains exons (coding regions) with introns (non-coding regions) remove. The non-coding region is removed by splicing leaving the exons to be transcribe into proteins. because the proteins are translated from mature mRNA, scientist would associate the protein of interest to the mRNA sequence and therefore reverse transcribing to the cDNA sequence to know the specific gene for that particular protein.