Minion power

A Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) team has shown the smORF-encoded microprotein MINION interacts with MYMK to induce fusion between muscle cells. The findings are the first demonstration of a biological role for a microprotein, and pave the way for development of therapies that exploit cellular fusion processes.

Small open reading frames (smORFs) have gone largely unrecognized due to a commonly used, arbitrary minimum size cut-off in amino acid sequences that reduces false-positives in identifying proteins. However, smORFs are garnering interest because many appear to encode functional short, typically single-domain proteins, called microproteins...