Key Points
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Small peptides of 100 amino acids or fewer are encoded by small open reading frames (smORFs) and mediate key physiological functions in animals and humans.
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smORFs constitute 99% of transcribed, but only 1% of annotated, coding sequences in flies, mice and humans.
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Different smORF classes show distinctive and predictive markers of functionality at the RNA level and the protein sequence level.
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The characteristics of different smORF classes are evolutionarily conserved across animal species, encouraging the use of Drosophila melanogaster and Mus musculus as model organisms for studies of peptide biology in the context of development, physiology and disease.
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Different smORF classes may represent steps in the origin and evolution of new genes and proteins.
Abstract
Small open reading frames (smORFs) of 100 codons or fewer are usually — if arbitrarily — excluded from proteome annotations. Despite this, the genomes of many metazoans, including humans, contain millions of smORFs, some of which fulfil key physiological functions. Recently, the transcriptome of Drosophila melanogaster was shown to contain thousands of smORFs of different classes that actively undergo translation, which produces peptides of mostly unknown function. Here, we present a comprehensive analysis of smORFs in flies, mice and humans. We propose the existence of several functional classes of smORFs, ranging from inert DNA sequences to transcribed and translated cis-regulators of translation and peptides with a propensity to function as regulators of membrane-associated proteins, or as components of ancient protein complexes in the cytoplasm. We suggest that the different smORF classes could represent steps in gene, peptide and protein evolution. Our analysis introduces a distinction between different peptide-coding classes of smORFs in animal genomes, and highlights the role of model organisms for the study of small peptide biology in the context of development, physiology and human disease.
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01 August 2017
The original online version of this article contained four errors, which have now been corrected. The corrections included two typos in the main text, the addition of a missing point in the X axis in Figure 3b, and the exchange of the position of two column headers in Figure 5c.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank their colleagues J. Pueyo, E. Magny, S. Bishop and F. Casares for helpful suggestions about the manuscript. This work was funded by grants from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (MINECO; ref. BFU/2016-77793-P) and the British Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC; ref. BB/N001753/1) to J.-P.C.
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Glossary
- Ribosome profiling
-
A technique that globally probes RNA molecules that are being actively translated by ribosomes by analysing ribosome-protected RNA fragments (ribosomal footprints).
- Translation efficiency
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A measure of the rate of translation for a given mRNA feature, obtained in ribosome profiling experiments. It usually consists of the ratio between ribosomal footprints and RNA sequencing reads generated by the mRNA region.
- Protein isoforms
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Variants of a given protein generated by the translation of alternative mRNA sequences, in distinct mRNAs produced by the same gene.
- ORF tagging
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A technique to probe the translation of a specific open reading frame (ORF), whereby a reporter sequence without a start codon is cloned in-frame with the assessed ORF.
- Helix–loop–helix
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(HLH). A DNA-binding domain that characterizes members of a transcription factor family. It is composed of two α-helices connected by a short loop.
- Pseudogene
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A paralogue of a functional protein-coding gene, which has lost its gene expression and/or protein-coding capacities.
- Paralogue
-
Homologous gene within a given species, usually generated by gene duplication.
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Couso, JP., Patraquim, P. Classification and function of small open reading frames. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 18, 575–589 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm.2017.58
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm.2017.58
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