Researchers at the University of Toronto and Sinai Health have created a new platform to identify proteins that can be co-opted to control the stability of other proteins — a new but largely unrealized approach to the treatment of disease.
Researchers at the University of Toronto and Sinai Health have created a new platform to identify proteins that can be co-opted to control the stability of other proteins — a new but largely unrealized approach to the treatment of disease.
The researchers developed a method to interrogate the entire human proteome for ‘effector’ proteins, which can influence the stability of other proteins via induced proximity. The study marks the first time researchers have searched for effector proteins on this scale, and has identified many new effectors that could be used therapeutically.
“We found more than 600 new effector proteins in 14,000 genes,” said Juline Poirson, first author on the study and visiting scientist at U of T’s Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research. “Over 200 of the new effectors can efficiently degrade their target proteins, while about 400 effectors were capable of stabilizing, and thereby increasing the abundance of, an artificial target protein.”
The study, which involved researchers at Sinai Health’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, was published in the journal Nature.
Read more at University of Toronto
Image: Professor Mikko Taipale (Credit: University of Toronto)
