Tuesday October 13, at 11:00, Jennifer Zanet, CBI, Toulouse (https://cbi-toulouse.fr/membre/zanet-jennifer/) will give a seminar at TAGC, seminar room, entitled 

"Small but mighty: microproteins as regulators of reproduction and metabolism in Drosophila"

Microproteins (also known as smORF/sORF peptides or micropeptides) are small proteins, typically fewer than 100 amino acids, encoded by small Open Reading Frames (smORFs). Initially excluded from genome annotations due to their small size, it is now well established that genomes harbor thousands of smORFs encoding functional microproteins. As the microproteome remains largely unexplored, microproteins are emerging as a rich and untapped source of novel biological regulators.

Our team investigates the biological and molecular functions of newly identified regulatory microproteins in vivo, using Drosophila as a model organism. In this seminar, I will present our recent work highlighting the roles of microproteins in controlling fertility and metabolism. These findings lead us to propose the microproteome as a valuable source of metabolic and reproductive regulators.