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Cell biology

Two hands for degradation

Nature volume 453, pages 460–461 (2008)Cite this article

Living cells must do away with regulatory proteins that are not needed. News comes of a considerable advance in understanding how the main agent of destruction, the proteasome, catches its targets.

The 26S proteasome is a formidable piece of equipment — it is one of the principal cellular machines for carrying out the essential task of degrading proteins. Proteins to be destroyed are marked with tags in the form of the small protein ubiquitin, and when the proteasome encounters such polyubiquitinated proteins, it catches, then degrades them. Papers by Husnjak et al.1 and Schreiner et al.2, which are the fruits of a multi-group collaboration and appear on pages 481 and 548 of this issue, show that the proteasome has, not one, but at least two hands with which it latches on to its ubiquitinated prey.

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Figure 1: A pair of hands for catching ubiquitin.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yasushi Saeki and Keiji Tanaka are at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, 3-18-22 Honkomagome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8613, Japan. saeki@rinshoken.or.jp tanakak@rinshoken.or.jp ,

    Yasushi Saeki & Keiji Tanaka

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  1. Yasushi Saeki
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  2. Keiji Tanaka
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Saeki, Y., Tanaka, K. Two hands for degradation. Nature 453, 460–461 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/453460a

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