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Gene regulation

Small ORFs conceal bioactive peptides

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 11, pages 594–595 (2010)Cite this article

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The study began as an investigation into a short conserved ORF in flies — polished-rice (pri), also known as tarsal-less — that causes epidermal defects when mutated. The lack of epidermal trichomes — or hairs — in pri mutants was reminiscent of mutants in shavenbaby (svb), which encodes a transcription factor that controls where trichomes appear during embryogenesis. As the expression of svb target genes is indeed lost in pri mutants, Kondo, Plaza and colleagues investigated the functional relationship between the two genes.

The expression of svb is unaffected by pri mutations; however, the authors show that the four short peptides derived from the pri mRNA direct the proteolytic cleavage of the amino-terminal domain of the SVB protein. This truncation turns SVB from a repressor into an activator. The putative proteolytic activity of pri therefore provides a crucial temporal switch: it is only when pri is expressed that SVB can activate its targets and initiate trichome formation.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Kondo, T. et al. Small peptides switch the transcriptional activity of Shavenbaby during Drosophila embryogenesis. Science 329, 336–339 (2010)

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Authors
  1. Tanita Casci
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Casci, T. Small ORFs conceal bioactive peptides. Nat Rev Genet 11, 594–595 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg2853

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