Dr. Daniel Gewirth, an Investigator at the Hauptman-Woodward Institute, has participated in a study that examined the way in which proteins are activated in the human body. Once proteins are synthesized from the information encoded in the DNA of a gene, they must be shepherded into their active shapes by the actions of other proteins in specialized compartments that are found in each cell in our bodies. In the recent study, which was published in the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Gewirth and colleagues discovered how some of these helper proteins, called chaperones, collaborate with each other to achieve the folded state of their client proteins. The work highlights the unexpected complexity, as well as the diversity of these chaperone mechanisms, and opens the way to one day targeting these pathways with drugs to treat diseases such as cancer.
Read the full paper here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2309326121
The study was led by the research team of Dr. Andrea N. Kravats of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and involved collaborations with scientists from HWI, Campbellsville University, and Ohio State University.