Microprotein Dysregulation in the Serum of Patients with Atrial Fibrillation

The incidence rate of atrial fibrillation (AF) has stayed
at a
high level in recent years. Despite the intensive efforts to study
the pathologic changes of AF, the molecular mechanism of disease development
remains unclarified. Microproteins are ribosomally translated gene
products from small open reading frames (sORFs) and are found to play
crucial biological functions, while remain rare attention and indistinct
in AF study. In this work, we recruited 65 AF patients and 65 healthy
subjects for microproteomic profiling. By differential analysis and
cross-validation between independent datasets, a total of 4 microproteins
were identified as significantly different, including 3 annotated
ones and 1 novel one. Additionally, we established a diagnostic model
with either microproteins or global proteins by machine learning methods
and found the model with microproteins achieved comparable and excellent
performance as that with global proteins. Our results confirmed the
abnormal expression of microproteins in AF and may provide new perspectives
on the mechanism study of AF.