Specificity of transmembrane protein palmitoylation in yeast.

GONZALEZ MONTORO A; CHUMPÉN, S; QUIROGA, R; VALDEZ TAUBAS J

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Lugar: San Francisco; Año: 2011 p. 1 - 1

Many proteins are modified after their synthesis, by the addition of a lipid molecule to one or more cysteine residues, through a thioester bond. This modification is called S-acylation, and more commonly palmitoylation. This reaction is carried out by a family of enzymes, called palmitoyltransferases (PATs), characterized by the presence of a conserved 50- aminoacids domain called ?Asp-His-His-Cys- Cysteine Rich Domain? (DHHC-CRD). There are 7 members of this family in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and each of these proteins is thought to be responsible for the palmitoylation of a subset of substrates. Substrate specificity of PATs, however, is not yet fully understood. Several yeast PATs seem to have overlapping specificity, and it has been proposed that the machinery responsible for palmitoylating peripheral membrane proteins in mammalian cells, lacks specificity altogether. Here we investigate the specificity of transmembrane protein palmitoylation in S. cerevisiae, which