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The role of micropeptides in biology

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Abstract

Micropeptides are small polypeptides coded by small open-reading frames. Progress in computational biology and the analyses of large-scale transcriptomes and proteomes have revealed that mammalian genomes produce a large number of transcripts encoding micropeptides. Many of these have been previously annotated as long noncoding RNAs. The role of micropeptides in cellular homeostasis maintenance has been demonstrated. This review discusses different types of micropeptides as well as methods to identify them, such as computational approaches, ribosome profiling, and mass spectrometry.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), European Union, QREN, FEDER and COMPETE for funding UnIC—Unidade de Investigação Cardiovascular (UIDB/00051/2020 and UIDP/00051/2020), iBiMED (UIDB/04501/2020, POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007628), LAQV/REQUIMTE (UIDB/50006/2020) research units. RV is supported by IF/00286/2015 grants.

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  1. Departamento de Cirurgia E Fisiologia, Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade Do Porto, UnIC, Porto, Portugal

    Rui Vitorino

  2. Department of Medical Sciences, iBiMED, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Rui Vitorino & Manuel Santos

  3. Departamento de Química, LAQV-REQUIMTE, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Sofia Guedes & Francisco Amado

  4. Department of Chemistry, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Sofia Guedes & Francisco Amado

  5. Isotope Science Center, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Nobuyoshi Akimitsu

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Vitorino, R., Guedes, S., Amado, F. et al. The role of micropeptides in biology. Cell. Mol. Life Sci. 78, 3285–3298 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00018-020-03740-3

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