Transcription and translation of pseudogenes
Sunday, February 23rd, 2014http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v11/n1/full/nmeth.2732.html
From the paper:
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2. Pseudogenes represent less than 0.1% of the total search space, yet a surprisingly large number, 36%, of human novel peptides mapped to pseudogenes (Fig. 2b). These findings are supported by recent peptide-level evidence of pseudogenes in mouse6. In humans, the observation of lineage- and cancer-specific expression of pseudogenes at the RNA level indicates biological relevance17. Our data suggest that pseudogenes may be not only transcribed but also translated. An interesting particular example was the pseudogene MYH16, identified by 20 peptides (Fig. 3), which were validated by LC-MS using synthetic peptides (Supplementary Fig. 15). The protein-coding capacity of MYH16 was previously shown to have been lost through double base deletion (resulting in a premature stop codon) during divergence of the human lineage from other primates18. However, our data show that, in the A431 cell line, the MYH16gene is actively encoding a shorter protein isoform with its translation initiation site downstream from the aforementioned double base deletion.
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