Degradation determinants are abundant in human noncanonical proteins

The comprehensive characterization of human proteins, a key objective in contemporary biology, has been revolutionized by the identification of thousands of potential novel proteins through ribosome profiling and proteomics. Determining the physiological activity of these noncanonical proteins has proven difficult, because they are encoded by different types of coding regions and tend to share no sequence similarity with canonical polypeptides. Evidence from immunopeptidomic assays combined with a better understanding of the quality control of protein synthesis suggest that many noncanonical proteins may possess low stability in the cellular environment. Here, we tested this hypothesis by analyzing the frequency of multiple sequence features eliciting either proteasomal degradation or autophagy across 91,003 canonical (annotated) protein isoforms and 232,460 noncanonical proteins. Overall, noncanonical proteins were enriched for degradation-related features compared to all canonical proteins. Notably, degradation determinants were also enriched in canonical protein isoforms starting with a non-methionine amino acid. Analyses of original and shuffled sequences showed evidence of selective pressure either against or towards the accumulation of specific degradation signatures only in major isoforms of canonical proteins. However, stability was significantly higher in noncanonical proteins with evidence of phenotypic effects when knocked-out in cell lines. Notably, we found that the C-terminal tail hydrophobicity represents a reliable proxy for degradation propensity with potential applications in identifying functional noncanonical proteins. These findings underscore the critical role of degradation processes in regulating the half-life of noncanonical proteins and demonstrate the power of degradation-associated signatures in discriminating noncanonical genes likely to encode for biologically functional molecules.