Among the about 20,000 genes giving rise to the human proteome there are still many rather unknown but potentially interesting genes that deserve some extra attention. Here we will focus on C19orf67, a gene with low evidence but specific and consistent expression detected in the testis across different datasets.

C19orf67 is a predicted intracellular protein with two protein-coding isoforms of about 200 and 350 amino acids in length that lack evidence on protein and transcript level in UniProt. However, data in the Human Protein Atlas suggest that this protein deserves a little more attention.

The expression profiles in both bulk and single cell RNA seq show enriched expression in testis and more specifically and mainly in early spermatids and late spermatids, and to a lesser degree in spermatocytes and oocytes. Expression clustering and correlation of tissue and single cell RNA seq data further show C19orf67 to cluster together with other genes known to be related to Spermatogenesis and Spermatid development such as spermatogenesis associated 16 (SPATA16) and sperm adhesion molecule 1 (SPAM1). These findings could be a starting point to further understand the function of this interesting protein.