The abundance of short proteins in the mammalian proteome.

ABSTRACT: Short proteins play key roles in cell signalling and other processes, but their abundance in the mammalian proteome is unknown. Current catalogues of mammalian proteins exhibit an artefactual discontinuity at a length of 100 aa, so that protein abundance peaks just above this length and falls off sharply below it. To clarify the abundance of short proteins, we identify proteins in the FANTOM collection of mouse cDNAs by analysing synonymous and non-synonymous substitutions with the computer program CRITICA. This analysis confirms that there is no real discontinuity at length 100. Roughly 10% of mouse proteins are shorter than 100 aa, although the majority of these are variants of proteins longer than 100 aa. We identify many novel short proteins, including a "dark matter" subset containing

SUBMITTER: Frith MC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1449894 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature