Although the Human Genome Project has been completed for over 20 years, our understanding of the function and regulation of human genome is still far from complete. In this issue of Frontiers of Medicine, Dan Liu et al. identified a novel human protein-coding gene, LY6A. This gene encodes the candidate ortholog of the mouse stem cell marker Ly-6A/Sca-1, and it is aberrantly expressed in human pituitary tumors. In this cover image, the newly identified human LY6A protein (green) is shown being tethered to the cell membrane by a GPI anchor, and its known homolog proteins, LY6E (light blue) and LY6L (light pink), are illustrated by the side of LY6A. The 3D structures of these proteins are predicted by AlphaFold (Google DeepMind. Jumper J, et al. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature, 2021. Varadi M, et al. AlphaFold Protein Structure Database: massively expanding the structural coverage of protein-sequence space with high-accuracy models. Nucleic Acids Research, 2021). The little yellow sticks within the structures denote the conserved disulfide bonds. (Courtesy of Drs. Chunhui Xu, Xiaojian Sun, and Zhe Bao Wu. See pages 458-475 by Dan Liu et al. for more information.)
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