NoBody

Where it comes from

Made in

Many cell types

Sent out by

Not secreted

Acts on

• P-bodies, the granules where messenger RNA is stored and destroyed

What it does

• The number of P-bodies in a cell runs opposite to how much NoBody it holds: raise the peptide and the granules disperse, lower it and more of them form ¹
• Joins the machinery that removes the cap from messenger RNA before decay, and changes how much of a decay-targeted transcript survives ¹
• Found in 2017 among hundreds of unannotated peptides turned up by proteomic surveys of human cells ²

In medicine

• None. NoBody acts inside the cell on messenger RNA, so it is neither a blood test nor something that could be given
• No human disease has been tied to NBDY, which is unsurprising: the gene was catalogued for years as a long non-coding RNA, so nobody looked for a protein in it ²

Beyond the body’s own use

• Nothing is in trials. The interest is what NoBody says about annotation: a sequence filed as non-coding encodes a peptide with a job, found only because surveys began hunting for products of short open reading frames ²
• The open question is whether P-body numbers can be set on purpose, and what that does to the lifetime of particular messenger RNAs; the work is still in cell lines ¹