Chuanlun Zhang

Abstract Planktonic microbial and viral communities are fundamental drivers of biogeochemical cycling and energy flow in marine ecosystems. These communities display substantial variability in their composition at daily to sub-daily scales, which cannot be captured by conventional low-frequency monthly or weekly sampling.

Introduction Until quite recently, small proteins have been overlooked for several reasons. In genome sequencing projects, open reading frames (ORFs) comprising fewer than 100 codons were by default not recognized as potential genes. This was a deliberate strategy to prevent the annotation of a large number of false positive gene predictions. Additionally, very small proteins disappeared in experimental approaches that were optimized for the characterization of normal-sized and large proteins.