Small proteins (<100 amino acids in length) exist ubiquitously in the three domains of life. Because of computational and experimental challenges, earlier studies have been focusing on a limited number of small proteins (SPs) families and large-scale studies of SPs almost present untapped research realm. Recently, a research team led by Prof. YU Jun and Prof. XIAO Jingfa at Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), reported the functional significance in an evolutionary context of lineage-specific SPs across eight well-studied eukaryotes.

In this study, SPs are grouped according to their sequence conservation within lineages of eukaryotes, vertebrates, and mammals. It reveals that species-specific SPs are much more abundant than conserved SPs in order to perform specialized functions. Additionally, the results indicated that a majority of the human-specific SPs are tissue-specific, while ancient human SPs tend to be widely expressed in all tissues.

The paper was in press online in Progress in Biochemistry and Biophysics on July 29, 2011.

 Life evolving from simple to complex (from left to right) and time (arrows) (Image by ZHAO Qian)

 Paper link: http://www.pibb.ac.cn/en/ch/common/view_abstract.aspx?flag=1&file_no=20110290

 Contact: Professor YU Jun  Email: junyu@big.ac.cn; Professor XIAO Jingfa  Email: xiaojingfa@big.ac.cn