Functional profile of the lipocalin protein family
| Autor: | Ganfornina, M. D., Åkerström, Bo, Sánchez, Diego |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Digital.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC instname |
| Popis: | Lipocalins form an ancestral protein family found in all kingdoms of life, except for Archaea. From a small number of family members, Lipocalins rapidly evolved through duplication and divergence in the vertebrate genome, giving rise to nineteen different proteins in humans. Despite a high sequence diversity of homologous Lipocalins, their tertiary structure displays a resilient fold of eight beta-barrels delimiting a binding pocket where they can accommodate different ligands, mostly hydrophobic. A close-to-linear accrual of publications marks the knowledge accumulation on Lipocalins since the family name was coined in 1985, but an inflection point appears in the literature after 2006, when the last comprehensive review of this protein family was collected. Since then, an explosion of association studies of Lipocalin expression with many human diseases has taken place, ranging from metabolic and endocrine syndromes to cancer, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative and psychiatric conditions. Regardless of this wealth of correlational data, with their understandable practical use as disease biomarkers, an analysis of publications devoted to Lipocalin biological function was needed. In this Research Topic Issue, 28 authors have contributed a valuable collection of eleven reviews, focused on the function of most vertebrate Lipocalins. Their analyses, at every organizational level (molecular, cellular, tissues or organ systems), uncover an interesting pattern where the common Lipocalin structure provides a basic biochemical tool put to work in an amazingly varied set of physiological and pathological contexts. Specializations are combined with shared properties, and labour division with functional redundancy. The Research Topic starts with a novel view of Lipocalins evolution in chordates (Diez-Hermano et al.), where the use of unbiased selection of animal species, have yielded a phylogenetic tree with strong support of previously elusive relationships. On this evolutionary pattern, we can now map the Lipocalin functions (Figure 1), updated by all contributors to the Topic. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|