Assistant Professor
Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology and Institute for Society and Genetics
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Title: Microproteins in vertebrate neurodevelopment and evolution
Abstract: Until recently, proteins smaller than 100 amino acids long were dismissed or missed, assumed to be background noise, incapable of folding properly, and lacking important biological functions. However, over the last decade, thousands of putative “microproteins” have been discovered to be translated from short open reading frames (sORFs), with many found to play essential functional roles. The de novo emergence of these microprotein-encoding sORFs – especially those that emerged at important evolutionary transitions – may have enabled new molecular and cellular functions that larger proteins otherwise would not be able to perform. In this talk, I will present our lab’s approaches to understand: how do vertebrate-specific microproteins contribute to novel molecular and cellular functions in neurodevelopment? I will present published and ongoing work from my lab focusing on microproteins enriched in developing brains, using in vivo behavioral and functional analyses, genome engineering, pharmacological profiling, genomics, and single-cell analyses using zebrafish and sea lamprey as models. Using these approaches, I will illustrate how we build a framework that integrates in vivo microprotein characterization across physiological and evolutionary scales – from organismal, to circuits and pathways, to cell and molecular levels – to discover crucial roles of novel microproteins and other genes in vertebrate neurodevelopment.
Host: Darcy Kelley
