Sequence, Structure, and Functional Space of Drosophila De Novo Proteins

Middendorf, Lasse; Iyengar Ravi, Bharat; Eicholt, Lars A.

Abstract

De novo proteins emerge from formerly noncoding regions of genomic DNA. While a few de novo proteins have been shown to perform essential functions in different organisms, it is experimentally laborious to discover the structure and the function of de novo proteins, especially at a large scale. To help address this problem, we used machine learning based computational tools to predict the structure and the function of ∼1,500 Drosophila de novo proteins, thereby providing a dataset for a focused experimental validation.