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Microproteins and Small ORFs

Edited by:

Xavier Roucou, PhD, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada

Submission Status: Open   |   Submission Deadline: 31 March 2025


Proteome Science is calling for submissions to our new Collection on Microproteins and Small ORFs. This Collection will cover a wide range of topics related to microproteins.



Image credit: Artur / Stock.adobe.com

About the Collection

The field of microproteins and other non-canonical proteins has seen significant growth in recent years. While their study presents major technical challenges, the development of numerous experimental strategies based on ribosome profiling and mass spectrometry has enabled the field to advance. What's particularly noteworthy about the discovery of microproteins is not just the discovery of new proteins, most of which are small and unannotated in conventional databases. It is becoming increasingly clear that transcripts that have been annotated as non-coding can in fact have functional open reading frames (ORFs) and produce proteins, eukaryotic transcripts can be polycistronic, pseudogenes can encode functional proteins, small ORFs encoding microproteins have a role in evolutionary innovation.

This Collection covers a wide range of topics related to microproteins, including, but not limited to:

• Databases for the study of microproteins and small ORFs
• Proteogenomic strategies for the detection of microproteins and small ORFs
• Function of microproteins in prokaryotes and eukaryotes (including plants)
• Pseudogenes- and lncRNAs-encoded microproteins
• Polycistronic transcripts
• Small ORFs and their roles in regulation and molecular evolution

There are currently no articles in this collection.

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submissions of original research and review articles. Should you wish to submit a different article type, please read our submission guidelines to confirm that type is accepted by the journal.

Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp. Please, select the appropriate Collection title “Microproteins and Small ORFs" under the “Details” tab during the submission stage.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer-review process. The peer-review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.