Small stress response proteins in Escherichia coli: proteins missed by classical proteomic studies.

ABSTRACT: Proteins of 50 or fewer amino acids are poorly characterized in all organisms. The corresponding genes are challenging to reliably annotate, and it is difficult to purify and characterize the small protein products. Due to these technical limitations, little is known about the abundance of small proteins, not to mention their biological functions. To begin to characterize these small proteins in Escherichia coli, we assayed their accumulation under a variety of growth conditions and after exposure to stress. We found that many small proteins accumulate under specific growth conditions or are stress induced. For some genes, the observed changes in protein levels were consistent with known transcriptional regulation, such as ArcA activation of the operons encoding yccB and ybgT. However, we

SUBMITTER: Hemm MR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2798279 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature