Remaining Mysteries of Molecular Biology: The Role of Polyamines in the Cell.
By L. Miller-Fleming, V. Olin-Sandoval, Kate Campbell, M. Ralser. Journal of Molecular Biology, 2015
624 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The polyamines (PAs) spermidine, spermine, putrescine and cadaverine are an essential class of metabolites found throughout all kingdoms of life. In this comprehensive review, we discuss their metabolism, their various intracellular functions and their unusual and conserved regulatory features. These include the regulation of translation via upstream open reading frames, the over-reading of stop codons via ribosomal frameshifting, the existence of an antizyme and an antizyme inhibitor, ubiquitin-independent proteasomal degradation, a complex bi-directional membrane transport system and a unique posttranslational modification-hypusination-that is believed to occur on a single protein only (eIF-5A). Many of these features are broadly conserved indicating that PA metabolism is both concentration critical and evolutionary ancient. When PA metabolism is disrupted, a plethora of cellular processes are affected, including transcription, translation, gene expression regulation, autophagy and stress resistance. As a result, the role of PAs has been associated with cell growth, aging, memory performance, neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic disorders and cancer. Despite comprehensive studies addressing PAs, a unifying concept to interpret their molecular role is missing. The precise biochemical function of polyamines is thus one of the remaining mysteries of molecular cell biology.
Subfields: Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Pharmacology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64b35ab438913761301b244b6464d2a08864ebc2
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Citations in the corpus
- Understanding the Holobiont: How microbial metabolites affect human health and shape the immune system (2017, background): “Polyamines are present in every living cell and fulfill important roles in gene expression and proliferation; therefore their endogenous production in eukaryotic cells is strictly regulated (Miller-Fleming et al., 2015).”
- Ribosomal frameshifting and transcriptional slippage: From genetic steganography and cryptography to adventitious use (2016, background): “In addition to the competitive inhibition that all antizymes exert on formation of active ornithine decarboxylase dimers, as shown by many studies (260), antizyme 1 also negatively controls polyamine extracellular uptake via receptor interaction (278,279), and promotes polyamine secretion (280).”