The role of micropeptides in biology

Micropeptides are small polypeptides coded by small open-reading frames. Progress in computational biology and the analyses of large-scale transcriptomes and proteomes have revealed that mammalian genomes produce a large number of transcripts encoding micropeptides. Many of these have been previously annotated as long noncoding RNAs. The role of micropeptides in cellular homeostasis maintenance has been demonstrated. This review discusses different types of micropeptides as well as methods to identify them, such as computational approaches, ribosome profiling, and mass spectrometry.