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Peptides encoded by short open reading frames regulate plant growth and development

All genomes contain millions of short open reading frames (<100 codons) that are discarded during genome annotation. Recently, it has been shown that peptides encoded by short open reading frames can perform many important functions in animal cells.

A group of researchers from the Laboratory of Functional Genomics and Plant Proteomics of IBCH, together with scientists from the Federal Research and Clinical Center of Physical-Chemical Medicine and Institute of Biomedical Chemistry, describes peptides encoded by sORFs in a model organism, Physcomitrella patens. The results published in international journal Genome Research. The authors identified about 70,000 transcribed short open reading frames located on long non-coding RNAs and various parts of messenger RNAs. Proteomic and peptidomic methods revealed the translation of peptides from several tens of short frames. Analysis of mutant moss lines with knockout and overexpression of some of them located on long non-coding RNAs revealed that the peptides play an important role in the regulation of moss growth and development. The mechanisms of such regulation need further study.

The study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation.

Morphology of wild type and sORF-encoded peptide mutant lines. The phenotypes of psep25 KO and PSEP25 OE lines grown on BCDAT medium.

september 5, 2019