Bioscience Chapter Database :: 3653 Chapters Now Online

Chapter category: Cell Metabolism

The Ubiquitin-Proteasome Pathway in Mammals: Mechanisms of Action and Involvement in Pathogenesis of Human Diseases

This chapter appears in the following book:

Proteasomes: The World of Regulatory Proteolysis

Edited by: Wolfgang Hilt
ISBN: 1-58706-011-6
» Get more information about this book at landesbioscience.com «

Chapter authors:
Aaron Ciechanover, Amir Orian and Alan L. Schwartz

Ubiquitin modification of a variety of cellular proteins plays a major role in numerous basic cellular processes. Among these are regulation of cell cycle and division, differentiation and development, involvement in the cellular response to stress and extracellular modulators, morphogenesis of neuronal networks, modulation of cell surface receptors, ion channels and the secretory pathway, DNA repair, regulation of the immune and inflammatory responses and biogenesis of organelles. The mechanisms that underlie these complex processes are poorly understood and many of the target proteins have yet to be identified. In most cases, modification of the protein substrate by ubiquitin targets it for degradation by the 26S proteasome complex. In some cases however, modification leads to targeting of the protein for degradation in the lysosome or the vacuole. Nonproteolytic functions of ubiquitination have been proposed but never established firmly. The list of cellular proteins that are targeted by the ubiquitin system is growing exponentially. Among them are cell cycle regulators such as mitotic and G1 cyclins, and cyclin-dependent kinases and their inhibitors. Tumor suppressors such as p53, transcriptional activators and their inhibitors, fos, myc, NFkB and Ikba, for example, cell surface receptors such as the growth hormone receptor and the T cell receptor, and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) proteins such as the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR), are also targeted by the ubiquitin system. Abnormal and otherwise denatured/misfolded proteins are recognized specifically and removed efficiently by the system. Degradation of a protein via the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway involves two discrete and successive steps:

  1. covalent attachment of multiple ubiquitin molecules to the protein substrate, and
  2. degradation of the tagged protein by the 26S proteasome, or in certain cases, by the lysosomes/vacuole (for selected recent reviews on the ubiquitin system, see refs. 1-18).

» Access chapter for $19



Additional chapters from this book:

Subunit Arrangement in the Human Proteasome

Burkhardt Dahlmann, Klavs B. Hendil, Poul Kristensen, Wolfgang Uerkvitz, Axel Sobek and Friedrich Kopp

The cytoplasm of mammalian tissues contains high concentrations of 20S proteasomes, the core of the major cytosolic proteolytic system.1 This multicatalytic proteinase degrades prot...

Active Sites and Assembly of the 20S Proteasome

Wolfgang Heinemeyer

During the past decade, rapid progress was made in elucidating the 20S proteasomes structure, as well as in establishing its unusual proteolytic mechanism. This was enormously facilitated by t...

The Regulatory Particle of the Yeast Proteasome

Michael H. Glickman, David M. Rubin, Christopher N. Larsen, Marion Schmidt and Daniel Finley

The ubiquitin-proteasome pathway is a major mediator of posttranslational control in eukaryotes, which functions in the control of cell proliferation, the cell cycle, and other processes. Conj...

Proteasome Crystal Structures

Matthias Bochtler, Lars Ditzel, Daniela Stock, Jan Löwe, Claudia Hartmann, Anja Dorowski, Robert Huber and Michael Groll

Many cellular processes, including stress response, cell cycle control and metabolic adaptation require protein turnover. The diversity of proteins that have to be degraded contrasts with the ...

The Mammalian Regulatory Complex of the 26 S Proteasome

Carlos Gorbea and Martin Rechsteiner

It has been nearly two decades since Hershko and colleagues elucidated the pathway that conjugates ubiquitin (Ub) to intracellular proteins and selects them for destruction.1-4 A se...

The 20S Proteasome Activator PA28 or 11S Regulator

Wolfgang Dubiel and Peter Kloetzel

The best characterized endogenous activators of the 20S proteasome are the PA700 or 19S regulator and the PA28 or 11S regulator (11S REG). The 19S regulator forms the 26S proteasome by associa...

Proteasome Activators and Synthetic Modulators: Significance for Antigen Presentation

Sherwin Wilk, Wei-Er Chen, Cezary Wojcik and Ronald P. Magnusson

Although the 20S proteasome is responsible for the bulk of extralysosomal proteolysis, the purified enzyme has negligible activity toward native proteins and only poorly degrades oligopeptides...

The Proteasome Inhibitors and Their Uses

Do Hee Lee and Alfred L. Goldberg

Knowledge about physiological functions of the proteasome, its biochemical mechanisms, and its importance in cell regulation have developed rather slowly, in large part because of difficulties...

Primary Destruction Signals

Erwin Knecht and A. Jennifer Rivett

Proteins that are relatively metabolically stable, with half-lives often exceeding the generation time coexist in the same cell with short-lived proteins that are rapidly degraded. The turnove...

The Ubiquitin System in Yeast

Erwin Knecht and A. Jennifer Rivett

For several years, most of the publications in the ubiquitin field began by accentuating the evolutionary conservation of the basic unit of the system, the polypeptide ubiquitin (Ub): ubiquiti...

The Ubiquitin-Proteasome Pathway in Mammals: Mechanisms of Action and Involvement in Pathogenesis of Human Diseases

Aaron Ciechanover, Amir Orian and Alan L. Schwartz

Ubiquitin modification of a variety of cellular proteins plays a major role in numerous basic cellular processes. Among these are regulation of cell cycle and division, differentiation and ...

Deubiquitinating Enzymes and the Regulation of Proteolysis

Rohan T. Baker

Ubiquitin is a highly conserved eukaryotic protein that is synthesized as a fusion protein precursor, either to itself, or to one of two ribosomal proteins.1 Accordingly, an endopep...

Degradation of Ornithine Decarboxylase, a Ubiquitin-Independent Proteasomal Process

Philip Coffino

Posttranslational control of the enzyme ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) employs unusual mechanisms. The proteasome degrades ODC, but ubiquitin is not involved in this process. ODC degradation is...

The Ubiquitin-Proteasome System in Cell Cycle Control

Carl Mann and Wolfgang Hilt

The duplication and division of cells occurs through a precisely regulated series of morphological and mechanistic steps. This process, termed the cell-division cycle, ...

p53 and the Proteasome Pathway

Martin Scheffner

In agreement with the notion that selective protein degradation is involved in the regulation of many cell regulatory processes, there is increasing evidence that deregulation of degradation c...

The Role of the Proteasome in Apoptosis

Lisa M. Grimm and Barbara A. Osborne

The regulated death of a cell is important in a variety of biological situations. Cell death is utilized in the selection of immunologically competent T- and B-lymphocytes, in the sculpting or...

Function of the Proteasome in the Protein Quality Control Process

Richard K. Plemper and Dieter H. Wolf

Secretion of proteins is an essential mechanism for life. Eukaryotic cells developed the complex central vacuolar system build up by the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), the Golgi apparatus, endoso...

MHC Class I Antigen Presentation and the Proteasome Pathway

Peter-M. Kloetzel and Ulrike Kuckelkorn

As part of the vertebrate immune surveillance system T cells recognize foreign (nonself) antigens which are bound by major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins. To allow binding to MHC mo...

Proteasomes in Prokaryotes

Peter Zwickl, Alfred L. Goldberg and Wolfgang Baumeister

The proteasome was first discovered as a cylinder-shaped particle of unknown function on electron micrographs of human erythrocyte cell lysates.1 More than a decade later, a large m...

The Proteasome in Posttranscriptional Control: A Protease with Endonuclease Activity?

Franck Petit, Claudia Kreutzer-Schmid, Karine Gautier, Anne-Sophie Jarrousse, Saloua Badaoui and Hans-Peter Schmid

Gene expression is regulated at different levels: transcription, translation and posttranslation (Fig. 1).

Cells use different modes of translational control1,2

Ubiquitin, Proteasomes and Neurodegenerative Disease

Peter-M. Kloetzel and Ulrike Kuckelkorn

While changing money in a bank at Wildbad-Kreut in Bavaria, Germany, in 1990 at a conference on "Proteolysis", one of us (RJM) observed in a pension pamphlet that nearly 40% of the G...

Proteasomes: A Historical Retrospective

Dieter H. Wolf

Proteasomes, the world of regulatory proteolysis: surprise and astonishment has struck the scientific community when the structural complexity and principal functions of these large proteinase...


SIGN IN

Email:


Password:


lost password?




[ Home | Authors | Editors | Custom Books | Chapter Reprints | Subscribe | Contact | Biotoons ]