Making novel proteins from pseudogenes.

Motivation: Recently, we made synthetic proteins from non-coding DNA of Escherichia coli. Encouraged by this, we asked: can we artificially express pseudogenes into novel and functional proteins? What kind of structures would be generated? Would these proteins be stable? How would the organism respond to the artificial reactivation of pseudogenes?

Results: To answer these questions, we studied 16 full-length protein equivalents of pseudogenes. The sequence-based predictions indicated interesting molecular and cellular functional roles for pseudogene-derived proteins.