2023-09-12 15:15:14
Our proteins are mainly responsible for regulating the functioning of our cells. In certain situations, these proteins undergo modifications to be able to deal with certain situations quickly, efficiently and reversibly. One of these modifications is sumoylation, which consists of coupling SUMO, a small protein fragment, to the target proteins.
Sumoylation is very important to protect and regulate the functioning of the protein machinery in situations of stress, for example, when a stroke occurs, to allow rapid cell proliferation or to assist in the processes of DNA damage repair. , among others. In fact, many tumors depend enormously on sumoylation to maintain their immortality and multiply indefinitely and therefore, different drugs that inhibit the sumoylation machinery are being evaluated for treatments against very aggressive tumors such as pancreatic cancer and different types of lymphomas.
Until now, it was known which proteins were susceptible to undergoing sumoylation at a given time and many of the different enzymes that were capable of carrying out this modification. However, it was not known which proteins each of these enzymes could sumoylate, or by which enzymes each protein could be sumoylated.
A new study opens a path that may lead to finding that data.
The study was carried out by the Ubiquitin Signaling and Proteomics and similar research group at the University of Seville at CABIMER (Andalusian Center for Molecular Biology and Regenerative Medicine) in Spain, directed by Román González Prieto, with the collaboration of scientists from the Universities of Leiden and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the ETH Zurich in Switzerland.
The team that carried out the investigation. (Photo: University of Seville)
In this work, the research team, led by Daniel Salas-Lloret, from the Leiden University Medical Center, prepared special traps that allowed them to solve the mystery of which proteins are sumoylated by which enzymes.
The data obtained allow, for the first time, to find hitherto unknown connections between the deregulation of these enzymes and the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, the resistance of certain tumors to chemotherapy treatments, or the control of the expression of the genes during embryonic development, among others.
The study is titled “SUMO-activated target traps (SATTs) enable the identification of a comprehensive E3-specific SUMO proteome.” And it has been published in the academic journal Science Advances. (Source: University of Seville)
#Connections #enzymes #neurodegenerative #diseases