Micropeptides are peptides that are generally considered to be less than 150 amino acids in length. The identification of these short peptides has been limited by their size, abundance, and the current standard parameters for defining protein-coding regions. They are noteworthy in that the evolutionary conservation of the ORFs protein coding potential tends to be […]

The dysregulation of translation in the central nervous system (CNS) has been linked to multiple neurodegenerative diseases, making translatomics a particularly important set of tools for learning and understanding more about neurological disease. Among the diseases in which translation has been implicated are amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), both of which […]

Multiple translation initiation sites (TISs) may allow for alternative proteoforms to arise from the translation of just a single mRNA. RNA-Seq is limited in that it cannot be utilized to predict alternative proteoforms, and the standard proteomics approaches alone may prove insufficient. In this regard, Ribosome profiling (Ribo-Seq) could be advantageous when used in conjunction […]

A range of human neurological disorders occur due to nucleotide repeat expansions which can cause disease by protein gain-of-function, protein loss-of-function, or RNA gain-of-function. The FMR1 (Fragile X Messenger Ribonucleoprotein 1) gene is responsible for making FMRP; a protein found in the brain, ovaries and testes among many other tissues. FMRP is an RNA binding […]

​Translation is initiated when the small ribosomal subunit, which scans from the 5’ end of the mRNA, recognises a start codon. Identifying sites of translation initiation is desirable for uncovering alternatively translated reading frames. When ribosomes initiate at noncanonical start codons of open reading frames (ORF), this creates a more diversified proteome without expansion of […]