The relatively small universe of human genes could grow by up to one-third, if a concerted effort to search for new genes that encode short proteins is successful.
Many known miniproteins have already been shown to play key roles in cellular metabolism and disease, so the international effort to catalog new ones and determine their functions, announced last week in, could shed light on a vast array of biochemical processes and provide targets for novel medicines.
Only 19,370 human genes are known to code for proteins. But current catalogs only include genes for proteins containing at least 100 amino acids each, a cutoff chosen in part because longer DNA sequences make it easier for geneticists to look for commonalities between species.
In recent years, researchers have come up with other ways to identify protein-coding sequences. One called Ribo-seq uses high-throughput sequencing technology to catalog all the RNAs in a sample that are bound to a ribosome at a given time. Those RNA sequences point to likely genes, although the technique can’t prove that any one sequence makes a stable, functional protein.
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