| Title | 'How Do We Know What We Don't Know?': Scientists Completely Define the Process of Methylation | |
| Date | Friday June 02 2023, @09:42AM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the dept. | ||
'How do we know what we don't know?': Scientists completely define the process of methylation:
UNSW Sydney researchers, for the first time, have completely defined the essential cellular process known as methylation. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the landmark study emphasizes the essential role methylation plays in the creation of proteins.
Methylation is a chemical reaction where a small molecule—known as a methyl group—gets added to, or 'tags', DNA, proteins, or other molecules. The process of methylation can affect how a cell behaves, for example by driving the development and differentiation of stem cells.
[...] "There are some aspects of the cell that have been comprehensively understood for a while now, such as the DNA sequence of many genomes," says Dr. Hamey, lead author on the study. However, other systems, such as the cell's chemical tagging of proteins, are almost never systematically understood.
"We've used a formal method to find out exactly what we don't know about methylation," says Dr. Hamey. Through a review of all the existing literature on methylation, the duo have come to the conclusion that we do in fact know the vast majority of this process, and there's very little left to be discovered.
"We've proposed a near-complete picture of this system," says Dr. Hamey. "And while it implies that there's not more detail to be discovered in this area, it opens up exciting new questions about the system as a whole and what this methylation tag actually does."
"Our work is about trying to understand how cells manage information and make decisions," says Prof. Wilkins. "This is important as cells make decisions all the time to adapt to changes in environment, to change what they do, to keep on growing or to die."
Something that has been known for some time is that within a cell, proteins can be tagged with small molecules, which serve as units of information or data. But until now we have never known, for any cell, just how many of any type of protein tag the cell has and what machinery the cell uses to put them there.
The system of methylation includes enzymes which modify another protein by adding a small molecule, in this case a methyl group, and 'tagging' it. The addition of methyl groups can affect how some molecules act in the body and changes to the methylation patterns of genes or proteins can influence a person's risk of developing certain diseases, including cancer.
"This is the space that we've been working in experimentally for a very long time," says Prof. Wilkins. "I set out to characterize this particular type of cell modification [methylation], but with a focus on working inside yeast, as a model organism for human and animal cells."
[...] In any methylation process, there is a connection between two proteins (the enzyme carrying the methyl group and the protein being methylated), that make up the core unit of this system. "So if there was more to be discovered, there's essentially going to be an interaction between these two proteins that we don't know about," says Dr. Hamey.
"We were able to use the knowledge of this connection to catalog the existing evidence and determine whether there are more of these connections that remain unknown—and if so, how many."
Journal Reference:
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2215431120
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