MCB Joint Seminar: Sarah Slavoff "Dark Matter of the Human Proteome"

With recent advances in technologies to profile translatomes, we now know that as many as thousands of small open reading frames (smORFs) in human cells are expressed despite not being annotated as protein-coding. We develop mass spectrometric methods to identify the "microproteins" that are encoded in smORFs, as well as biochemical and mechanistic investigation of their expression mechanisms and cellular functions. I will discuss microproteins that regulate apoptosis and a specific pathway of transcriptional repression, and discuss their implications for human disease.