A bioinformatics finding shows that numerous human heat shock proteins (HSPs) homologues are common in plants. Human heat shock proteins (HSPs), which are expressed to higher temperature or other stress, have chaperone activity belong to four conserved classes: HSP60, HSP70, HSP90 and HSP100. Bioinformatics blast search reveals that each of the human HSP classes possess a number of plant homolo...

The functional relationship between thermotolerance and heat shock protein (HSP) expression is well described. However, the intraspecific variation in HSP70 expression and heat resistance is not fully understood. Some studies have shown a correlation between thermotolerance and HSP70 expression levels at the intraspecific level, whereas others have not, and results depend on species, developmen...

hYVH1 [human orthologue of YVH1 (yeast VH1-related phosphatase)] is an atypical dual-specificity phosphatase that is widely conserved throughout evolution. Deletion studies in yeast have suggested a role for this phosphatase in regulating cell growth. However, the role of the human orthologue is unknown. The present study used MS to identify Hsp70 (heat-shock protein 70) as a novel hYVH1-bindin...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the first most common neurodegenerative disease. Despite a large amount of research, the pathogenetic mechanism of AD has not yet been clarified. The two hallmarks of the pathology of AD are the extracellular senile plaques (SPs) of aggregated amyloid-beta (Aβ) peptide and the accumulation of the intracellular microtubule-associated protein tau into fibrillar aggrega...

The heat-shock response is characterized by the activation of heat-shock transcription factor 1 (HSF1), followed by increased expression of heat-shock proteins (Hsps). The stress-induced subnuclear compartmentalization of HSF1 into nuclear stress granules has been suggested to be an important control step in the regulation of stress response and cellular homeostasis in human cells. In this stud...

The sequence relationship between the small heat shock proteins and the eye lens protein alpha-crystallin (Ingolia, T. D., and E. E. Craig, 1982, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 79: 2360-2364) prompted us to subject rat lenses in organ culture to heat shock and other forms of stress. The effects on protein synthesis were followed by labeling with [35S]methionine and analysis by one- and two-dimensi...

In this issue of Molecular Cell, Di Giammartino et al. (2012) identify a new function for PARP1 in the post-transcriptional regulation of mRNAs via ADP-ribosylation of poly(A) polymerase, a mRNA 3′ processing enzyme. Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase 1 (PARP1, also known as ARTD1) is an abundant nuclear protein that covalently modifies target proteins with poly(ADP-ribose) (PAR) using NAD+ as a subst...

Group A1 heat shock transcription factors (HsfA1s) are the master regulators of the heat stress response (HSR) in plants. Upon heat shock, HsfA1s trigger a transcriptional cascade that is composed of many transcription factors. Despite the importance of HsfA1s and their downstream transcriptional cascade in the acquisition of thermotolerance in plants, the molecular basis of their activation re...

Hsp70s function as molecular chaperones. The protective chaperone activities of hsp70 help to confer tolerance to heat, glucose deprivation, and drought. Overexpression of hsp70s in many organisms correlates with enhanced thermotolerance, altered growth, and development. To better understand the roles of hsp70 proteins in Arabidopsis, the molecular and physiological consequences of altered expr...

Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are molecular chaperones involved in many cellular functions. It has been shown that mammalian cytosolic HSP70 binds antigenic peptides mediating the activation of the immune system, and that it plays a determining role in tumour immunogenicity. This suggests that HSP70 may be used for the production of conjugated vaccines. Human and plant HSPs share high sequence sim...