ArticleNature communications2026
Community benchmarking and evaluation of human unannotated microprotein detection by mass spectrometry based proteomics.
Article in Nature communications, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mapping the functional dark proteome in cancer.Nature reviews. Cancer · 2026Review
- A microprotein atlas of the human frontal cortex in Alzheimer's disease.Nature aging · 2026Article
- Ribo-ITP enables identification of translons from limited input samples.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- A Proteogenomic Approach to Discover Novel lncRNA-Derived Microproteins and Their Potential Clinical Utility in Hepatocellular Carcinoma.Molecular & cellular proteomics : MCP · 2026Article
- Microproteins in Human Physiology and Pathology.Biochemistry · 2026Review
- An expanded reference catalog of translated open reading frames for biomedical research.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- Degradation Determinants Are Abundant in Human Noncanonical Proteins and Minor Annotated Isoforms.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
- Update of
Authors and funding
34 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Thousands of short open reading frames (sORFs) are translated outside of annotated coding sequences. Recent studies have pioneered searching for sORF-encoded microproteins in mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics and peptidomics datasets. Here, we assessed literature-reported MS-based identifications of unannotated human proteins. We find that studies vary by three orders of magnitude in the number of unannotated proteins they report. Of nearly 10,000 reported sORF-encoded peptides, 96% were unique to a single study, and 12% mapped to annotated proteins or proteoforms. Manual curation of a benchmark dataset of 406 manually evaluated spectra from 204 sORF-encoded proteins revealed large variation in peptide-spectrum match (PSM) quality between studies, with immunopeptidomics studies generally reporting higher quality PSMs than conventional enzymatic digests of whole cell lysates. We estimate that 65% of predicted sORF-encoded protein detections in immunopeptidomics studies were supported by high-quality PSMs versus 7.8% in non-immunopeptidomics datasets. Our work stresses the need for standardized protocols and analysis workflows to guide future advancements in microprotein detection by MS towards uncovering how many human microproteins exist.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.