Chronic stress in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) underlies many degenerative and metabolic diseases involving apoptosis of vital cells. A well-established example is autosomal dominant retinitis pigmentosa (ADRP), an age-related retinal degenerative disease caused by mutant rhodopsins. Similar mutant alleles of Drosophila Rhodopsin-1 also impose stress on the ER and cause age-related retinal degeneration in that organism. Well-characterized signalling responses to ER stress, referred to as the unfolded protein response (UPR), induce various ER quality control genes that can suppress such retinal degeneration. However, how cells activate cell death programs after chronic ER stress remains poorly understood. Here, we report the identification of a signalling pathway mediated by cdk5 and mekk1 required for ER-stress-induced apoptosis. Inactivation of these genes specifically suppressed apoptosis, without affecting other protective branches of the UPR. CDK5 phosphorylates MEKK1, and together, they activate the JNK pathway for apoptosis. Moreover, disruption of this pathway can delay the course of age-related retinal degeneration in a Drosophila model of ADRP. These findings establish a previously unrecognized branch of ER-stress response signalling involved in degenerative diseases.
Pubmed ID: 22388889 RIS Download
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Scansite searches for motifs within proteins that are likely to be phosphorylated by specific protein kinases or bind to domains such as SH2 domains, 14-3-3 domains or PDZ domains. The Motifscanner program utilizes an entropy approach that assesses the probability of a site matching the motif using the selectivity values and sums the logs of the probability values for each amino acid in the candidate sequence. The program then indicates the percentile ranking of the candidate motif in respect to all potential motifs in proteins of a protein database. When available, percentile scores of some confirmed phosphorylation sites for the kinase of interests or confirmed binding sites of the domain of interest are provided for comparison with the scores of the candidate motifs.
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