Genome Biology<\/a>\u00a0focused on a type of chemical modification called acetylation.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\nThinking about what acetylation is\u00a0\u2014\u00a0a chemical modification to an existing protein\u00a0\u2014\u00a0can be a little abstract. First author on the paper, Rebecca Hardman-Kavanaugh, who conducted the research as a Ph.D. student in cell and molecular biology at the U\u202fof\u202fA, offers a metaphor for understanding the process:\u00a0<\/p>\n
Think of the cell as a tiny factory. There are a range of things that need to be done to make the factory function, and what does the work\u00a0are\u00a0proteins. They are like robots with a pre-programmed\u00a0job to do. But\u00a0in the event of\u00a0an emergency\u00a0\u2014\u00a0say, a heat shock\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the factory’s priorities change. Some tasks must be\u00a0dropped\u00a0and new ones taken on to\u00a0assist\u00a0with survival. The cell\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0just make new robots. It reprograms old ones to address the emergency. One switch that signals that reprogramming\u00a0appears to be\u00a0acetylation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“One thing that has emerged is that defects in global acetylation correlate with different diseases,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an associate professor of biological sciences who was the\u00a0principle\u00a0investigator on the project and Hardman-Kavanaugh’s Ph.D. adviser.\u00a0“People with heart disease, their global acetylation patterns differ in their hearts than healthy individuals. And\u00a0it’s\u00a0the same for\u00a0a number of\u00a0things ranging from Parkinson’s disease to cancer.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
The interdisciplinary team showed that when yeast cells experience\u00a0high temperatures, hundreds of proteins change\u00a0in the amount of\u00a0protein acetylation. The team’s\u00a0hypothesis\u00a0is that the cells are rapidly\u00a0activating\u00a0the protein\u00a0functions\u00a0the cell needs to survive\u00a0\u2014\u00a0prioritizing the most important\u00a0\u2014\u00a0while turning off the ones it does not need.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Acetylation as a protein modification was first discovered\u00a0more than\u00a060 years ago and was long thought to only control gene expression,\u00a0or\u00a0determining\u00a0what proteins get made in the first place. More recently, scientists have discovered that thousands of proteins with diverse functions are acetylated.\u00a0For\u00a0the vast majority of\u00a0these\u00a0proteins,\u00a0the role of acetylation is unclear.\u00a0Some\u00a0researchers\u00a0have even argued that acetylation may be\u00a0chemical\u00a0“noise”\u00a0with no function at all.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The team’s\u00a0findings argue against that, at least for a subset of proteins that change in their level of acetylation during heat stress.\u00a0They\u00a0found that acetylation changes are much more likely to occur on proteins that the cell needs during\u00a0stress.\u00a0They\u00a0also found that some key proteins have multiple acetylation sites that change in opposite directions, with acetylation increasing on one part of a protein and decreasing on another, suggesting that there is sophisticated and precise regulation of protein activity that is hard to explain as mere noise.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Because acetylation exists in all life,\u00a0including humans, these findings\u00a0will\u00a0likely translate\u00a0into\u00a0our\u00a0understanding\u00a0of\u00a0how cells in\u00a0other\u00a0organisms respond to stressful conditions.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lewis’ lab at the U\u202fof\u202fA studies how cells\u00a0adapt and even thrive in the face of environmental stresses like heat. Lewis noted that\u00a0a\u00a0better understanding of the relationship between acetylation and cellular modification could open the door to\u00a0new\u00a0therapeutics.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If researchers can tease out what the acetylation patterns in yeast proteins are telling us about stress responses, Lewis said,\u00a0it has the potential to tell us what is happening in humans.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lewis also noted\u00a0that\u00a0this work could not have been\u00a0accomplished\u00a0without the support of a\u00a0grant from the\u00a0National Science\u00a0Foundation,\u00a0which is the premier agency that supports fundamental research in the U.S.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Additional\u00a0authors on the paper include Aaron J.\u00a0Storey, Tara N. Stuecker, Stephanie E. Hood, Gregory A. Barrett-Wilt, Venkata R. Krishnamurthi, Yong Wang, Stephanie D. Byrum, Samuel G. Mackintosh, Rick D. Edmondson, Wayne P. Wahls\u00a0and Alan J. Tackett.\u00a0Stuecker, Hood,\u00a0Krishnamurthi\u00a0and Wang are all affiliated with the U of A.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The planet is getting\u00a0hotter, and life will need to adapt to rising temperatures to survive. One way that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":["post-558645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}