基因组编码小分子蛋白质研究进展

Trends in the Study of Small Proteins Encoded by Genomes

不超过50个氨基酸组成的蛋白在所有生物体中表现的特征都不明显。对其相应的基因进行确实可靠的注释非常具有挑战性。由于从细胞中纯化和鉴定小分子蛋白产物极其困难,难以确切知道细胞内有多少小分子蛋白,更不用说研究它们的生物学功能了。但越来越多的例子表明,小分子蛋白在细胞中分布广泛,而且有着不同的细胞生理学功能。本文即是对小分子蛋白研究进展的简要总结。

The characteristics of proteins having 50 or fewer amino acids are poor in all organisms, and reliably annotating genes encoding these small proteins is one of the biggest challenges. Due to the difficulty of purifying and characterizing the small protein products, there is little information about the abundance of small proteins, not to mention their biological functions. However, an increasing body of evidence shows the diverse role of small pro- teins in cell physiology, as well as their universal distribution. In this paper, we reviewed current study of small proteins.