An enzyme called proteasome phosphatase that appears to regulate removal of damaged proteins from a cell has been identified by scientists at the University of California, San Diego and UC Irvine. The understanding of how this process works could have important implications for numerous diseases, including cancer and Parkinson's disease.The study – led by Jack E. Dixon, PhD, professor of Pharmacology, Cellular & Molecular Medicine, and Chemistry/Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and Vice President and chief scientific officer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute – appears this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Proteasomes are very large protein complexes found in all eukaryote cells, in archaea (a group of single-celled microorganisms) and in some bacteria. These basket-like chambers are essential for removing damaged or misfolded proteins from the cell. The inability of a defective proteasome to destroy misfolded or damaged proteins can be cataclysmic.
Scientists have known for some time that the proteasome can be regulated by a process called phosphorylation – a chemical process by which a phosphate is added to a protein in order to activate or deactivate it, and which plays a crucial role in biological functions, controlling nearly every cellular process, including metabolism, gene transcription and translation, cell movement, and cell death. However, researchers had a poor understanding of the kinases that put the phosphate residues on the proteasome and almost no understanding of the phosphatases that remove the phosphates.
Source:Medindia
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