Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Schlesinger, Dörte
• Elsässer, Simon J.

Titel

Revisiting sORFs: overcoming challenges to identify and characterize functional microproteins

Ist Teil von

• The FEBS journal, 2022-01, Vol.289 (1), p.53-74

Ort / Verlag

England: Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Short ORFs (sORFs), that is, occurrences of a start and stop codon within 100 codons or less, can be found in organisms of all domains of life, outnumbering annotated protein‐coding ORFs by orders of magnitude. Even though functional proteins smaller than 100 amino acids are known, the coding potential of sORFs has often been overlooked, as it is not trivial to predict and test for functionality within the large number of sORFs. Recent advances in ribosome profiling and mass spectrometry approaches, together with refined bioinformatic predictions, have enabled a huge leap forward in this field and identified thousands of likely coding sORFs. A relatively low number of small proteins or microproteins produced from these sORFs have been characterized so far on the molecular, structural, and/or mechanistic level. These however display versatile and, in some cases, essential cellular functions, allowing for the exciting possibility that many more, previously unknown small proteins might be encoded in the genome, waiting to be discovered. This review will give an overview of the steadily growing microprotein field, focusing on eukaryotic small proteins. We will discuss emerging themes in the molecular action of microproteins, as well as advances and challenges in microprotein identification and characterization. Microproteins are small proteins produced from short ORFs (sORFs). Their coding potential has remained largely ignored, but recent advances in bioinformatics and omics technologies have propelled this field forward and identified many potentially coding sORFs, some of which were shown to exhibit versatile and important cellular functions. Here, we discuss the molecular action of microproteins and review recent developments in the investigation of these small cellular regulators.