Discovery of lincRNA-encoded Peptides: An Integrated Transcriptomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics Approach

Long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) refers to the family of RNA transcripts with more than 200 nucleotides in length, but cannot encode proteins. lincRNA (long intergenic noncoding RNA) is a subset of lncRNA that do not overlap with known genes. Increasing evidences have shown that some of these transcripts do in fact contain open reading frames (ORFs) to code short peptides, and do have significant functional roles within the cells. However, many of these peptides remain unannotated and uncharacterized. This study proposes a workflow integrating proteomics, transcriptomics and bioinformatics specifically for lincRNA-encoded peptide discovery.