Evolutionary emergence and preservation of microproteins encoded by upstream ORFs

This project explores the evolutionary emergence and conservation of microproteins encoded by upstream and downstream open reading frames (uORFs and dORFs) across Saccharomyces species. To achieve this, we generated deep sequencing Nanopore direct RNA and Illumina RNA datasets for seven Saccharomyces species spanning approximately 16 million years of evolutionary divergence. In parallel, we produced ribosome profiling (Ribo-Seq) data for all non-reference species. Comparative analyses reveal that a subset of uORFs is phylogenetically conserved and translated at levels comparable to canonical protein-coding sequences, supporting their potential functional relevance. Together, this dataset constitutes a comprehensive resource for investigating the functional and evolutionary dynamics of translated non-canonical ORFs and the microproteins they encode in budding yeast.