Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
Laboratory of Microbial Processes & Biodiversity - LMPB; Department of Hydrobiology, Universidade Federal de São Carlos - UFSCar, São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil.
Nat Commun. 2024 Aug 31;15(1):7563. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-51894-6.
Small open reading frames (smORFs) shorter than 100 codons are widespread and perform essential roles in microorganisms, where they encode proteins active in several cell functions, including signal pathways, stress response, and antibacterial activities. However, the ecology, distribution and role of small proteins in the global microbiome remain unknown. Here, we construct a global microbial smORFs catalog (GMSC) derived from 63,410 publicly available metagenomes across 75 distinct habitats and 87,920 high-quality isolate genomes. GMSC contains 965 million non-redundant smORFs with comprehensive annotations. We find that archaea harbor more smORFs proportionally than bacteria. We moreover provide a tool called GMSC-mapper to identify and annotate small proteins from microbial (meta)genomes. Overall, this publicly-available resource demonstrates the immense and underexplored diversity of small proteins.
小分子开放阅读框（smORFs）长度小于 100 个密码子，广泛存在于微生物中，并在其中发挥重要作用，它们编码的蛋白质在多种细胞功能中具有活性，包括信号通路、应激反应和抗菌活性。然而，小分子在全球微生物组中的生态、分布和作用仍不清楚。在这里，我们构建了一个源自 63410 个公开的宏基因组、来自 75 个不同生境和 87920 个高质量分离株基因组的全球微生物小分子开放阅读框目录（GMSC）。GMSC 包含 9.65 亿个非冗余小分子开放阅读框，并进行了全面注释。我们发现，与细菌相比，古菌中小分子开放阅读框的比例更高。此外，我们还提供了一种名为 GMSC-mapper 的工具，用于从微生物（宏）基因组中识别和注释小分子蛋白。总的来说，这个公开的资源展示了小分子蛋白巨大而尚未充分探索的多样性。
