Microprotein Dysregulation in the Serum of Patients with Atrial Fibrillation

The incidence rate of atrial fibrillation (AF) has stayed at a high level in recent years. Despite the intensive efforts to study the pathologic changes of AF, the molecular mechanism of disease development remains unclarified. Microproteins are ribosomally translated gene products from small open reading frames (sORFs) and are found to play crucial biological functions, while remain rare attention and indistinct in AF study. In this work, we recruited 65 AF patients and 65 healthy subjects for microproteomic profiling. By differential analysis and cross-validation between independent datasets, a total of 4 microproteins were identified as significantly different, including 3 annotated ones and 1 novel one. Additionally, we established a diagnostic model with either microproteins or global proteins by machine learning methods and found the model with microproteins achieved comparable and excellent performance as that with global proteins. Our results confirmed the abnormal expression of microproteins in AF and may provide new perspectives on the mechanism study of AF.