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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2017 Jul 21.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol. 2015 Oct 14;16(11):651–664. doi: 10.1038/nrm4069

Figure 6.

Figure 6

Proposed cellular roles for the peptide products of translated short ORFs identified by ribosome profiling. a) The two Sarcolamban peptides are 28 and 29 amino acids in length, conserved from fruit flies to human, and regulate normal heart function in flies through direct binding to the Ca-P60A SERCA Calcium transporter in cardiac tissue. Modified with permission from ref83. b) Sera from HCMV positive blood donors identified a specific and robust antigenic response against multiple short peptides translated from the β 2.7 RNA, previously thought to act as a noncoding RNA. c) Spurious translation of short regions may produce a pool of peptides with weak or no cellular function. New protein domains may evolve through selection for maintenance of peptides with weak cellular function, followed by stop codon mutation and further selection for increasingly specific and important cellular function over time.