Charlotte Hutchings (Lilley Group) has just been awarded her PhD from the Department and is joint first author on a paper published in Nature Reviews in Molecular Cell Biology.
Together with colleagues from the Science for Life Laboratory at Stockholm and the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University, the Lilley Group has published this review article that discusses the known mechanisms of protein localisation and how subcellular localisation controls protein function. It highlights the importance of localisation for protein function and the ways in which changes in localisation can fine-tune functionality and promote the evolution of multifunctional proteins. Examples are given of the effects of protein localisation on establishing distinct cell types and phenotypes, followed by a discussion of the growing body of literature describing protein mis-localisation in disease.
The paper concludes that the development of diverse methodologies for the study of protein subcellular localisation has revealed that most proteins display complex spatiotemporal distributions. It discusses that the ways in which the cell establishes and regulates these distributions are largely independent of protein abundance and extremely relevant for cell function. It concludes that major challenges remain in our understanding of the relationship between protein subcellular location and function, it suggests that such an understanding “is a monumental task that will undoubtedly require concerted community effort and cooperation, yet can reward us with new avenues for both fundamental and clinical research.”
Read the paper: Subcellular localization as a driver of protein function
Image: Fig. 1: Cellular mechanisms of protein localization