Comprehensive computational identification and characterization of conserved small ORFs in animals

There is increasing evidence that transcripts or transcript regions annotated as non-coding can harbor functional short open reading frames (sORFs). Loss-of-function experiments have identified essential developmental or physiological roles for a few of the encoded peptides (micropeptides), but genome-wide experimental or computational identification of functional sORFs remains challenging. In this project we expand our previously developed method and present results of an integrated computational pipeline for the identification of conserved sORFs in human, mouse, zebrafish, fruit fly and the nematode C. elegans. This dataset represents the peaklist of identified novel and annotated mouse micropeptides by mass spectrometry.