A Practical Guide to Small Protein Discovery and Characterization using Mass Spectrometry

Small proteins of up to ∼50 amino acids are an abundant class of biomolecules across all domains of life. Yet, due to the challenges inherent in their size, they are often missed in genome annotations, and are difficult to identify and characterize using standard experimental approaches. Consequently, we still know few small proteins even in well-studied prokaryotic model organisms. Mass spectrometry (MS) has great potential for the discovery,...