As part of its Hirschmann Lecture Series, the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry hosts guest speaker Alan Saghatelian, whose topic will be "Discovery and Functional Assignment of small ORFS (smORFs)". He is a professor with Clayton Foundation Laboratories for Peptide Biology & Dr. Frederik Paulsen Chair at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

The seminar will be preceded by a reception at 4:30 p.m., in the David Love Lounge.

Sponsored by the Ralph F. Hirschmann Lectureship Fund.

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Abstract:

Recent work has revealed small open reading frames (smORFs) that encode peptides and small proteins of less than 150-amino acids, termed microproteins, as an overlooked source of coding potential in the genome. Several microproteins have been characterized, so far, and are implicated in a variety of cellular processes, including regulation of mRNA decay, DNA repair, muscle formation, and more. Thus, rigorous and comprehensive annotation of smORFs in the human genome is of fundamental importance. We will discuss the discovery and characterization of novel smORFs and microproteins and detail the the future directions in this area. The identification of these smORFs and microproteins has significantly raised the number of known protein-coding genes in the human genome, and radically alters the current view of the protein-coding capacity of the genome and the composition of the proteome.