Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Translational products encoded by novel ORFs may form protein-like structures and have biological functions

Sudhakaran Prabakaran

IISER Pune / University of Cambridge

Our group is interested in the functional interpretation of mutations in certain noncoding regions of the genome. We focus on specific regions of the genome that we call novel Open Reading Frames (nORFs). Our past studies, and that of others, have brought to attention the existence of non canonical protein products encoded by these novel ORFs, but they have been dismissed as inconsequential although they keep turning up in many biological conditions. This has led us to speculate the putative structural and regulatory roles of these novel proteins. In this talk, I will share some preliminary unpublished results on our systematic investigation of nORFs. I will briefly touch upon the structural and biochemical properties of ~5.3 million nORF encoded proteins, nORF encoded proteins in B and T cells, mutations and consequences of mutations that map to some of these nORFs.