In yeast, aggregation and toxicity of the expanded polyglutamine fragment of human huntingtin strictly depend on the presence of the endogenous self-perpetuating aggregated proteins (prions), which contain glutamine/asparagine-rich domains. Some chaperones of the Hsp100/70/40 complex, modulating propagation of yeast prions, were also reported to influence polyglutamine aggregation in yeast, but...

Mycobacterium leprae HSP18, a major immunodominant antigen of M. leprae pathogen, is a small heat shock protein. Previously, we reported that HSP18 is a molecular chaperone that prevents aggregation of different chemically and thermally stressed client proteins and assists refolding of denatured enzyme at normal temperature. We also demonstrated that it can efficiently prevent the thermal killi...

Exposure of cells to reactive oxygen species (ROS) causes a rapid and significant drop in intracellular ATP levels. This energy depletion negatively affects ATP-dependent chaperone systems, making ROS-mediated protein unfolding and aggregation a potentially very challenging problem. Here we show that Get3, a protein involved in ATP-dependent targeting of tail-anchored (TA) proteins under nonstr...

Chaperone function plays a key role in sequestering damaged proteins and in repairing proteotoxic damage. Chaperones are induced by environmental stress and are called as stress or heat shock proteins. Here, we summarize the current knowledge about protein damage in aged organisms, about changes in proteolytic degradation, chaperone expression and function in the aging process, as well as the i...

BACKGROUND & AIMS Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress has been associated with development of inflammatory bowel disease. We examined the effects of ER stress-induced chaperone response and the orally active chemical chaperones tauroursodeoxycholate (TUDCA) and 4-phenylbutyrate (PBA), which facilitate protein folding and reduce ER stress, in mice with colitis. METHODS We used dextran sulfate so...

Although native chemical ligation (NCL) and related chemoselective ligation approaches provide an elegant method to stitch together unprotected peptides, the handling and purification of insoluble and aggregation-prone peptides and assembly intermediates create a bottleneck to routinely preparing large proteins by completely synthetic means. In this work, we introduce a new general tool, Fmoc-D...

Yersinia pestis, a human and animal pathogen, uses the type III secretion system (T3SS) for delivering virulence factors and effectors into the host cells. The system is conserved in animal pathogens and is hypothesized to deliver the virulence factors directly from bacterial to mammalian cells through a pore composed of YopB and YopD translocation proteins. The YopB and YopD translocator prote...

Yersinia pestis, a human and animal pathogen, uses the type III secretion system (T3SS) for delivering virulence factors and effectors into the host cells. The system is conserved in animal pathogens and is hypothesized to deliver the virulence factors directly from bacterial to mammalian cells through a pore composed of YopB and YopD translocation proteins. The YopB and YopD translocator prote...

Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress leads to accumulation of un- or misfolded proteins inside the ER and initiates the unfolded protein response (UPR). Several UPR components are physiologically involved in pancreatic development and are pathophysiologically activated during acute pancreatitis. However, the exact role of ER stress in exocrine pancreatic acini is mainly unclear. The present study ...

A subtype of phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH) deficiency that responds to cofactor (tetrahydrobiopterin, BH4) supplementation has been associated with phenylketonuria (PKU) mutations. The underlying molecular mechanism of this responsiveness is as yet unknown and requires a detailed in vitro expression analysis of the associated mutations. With this aim, we optimized the analysis of the kinetic ...