How herpes viruses use the cell’s machinery to shut themselves off

Herpes viruses (simplex — for fever blisters, Kaposi’s sarcoma, herpes zoster — shingles) persist in the body in a latent state where they don’t don’t reproduce, don’t make many of their proteins and don’t make trouble.   Every now and then they reproduce and cause disease, as anyone with recurrent fever blisters will tell you.  Staying quiet allows them to avoid the immune system and essentially act as selfish DNA.

A recent paper [ PNAS vol. 120 e2212864120 ’23 ] shows that Kaposi’s Sarcoma Herpes Virus (KSHV) uses a circular RNA (circRNA) derived from a human oncogene called RELL1.  The circular RNA they induce is called hsa_circ-0001400.  In general circular RNAs are formed by back splicing of a 5′ splice to an upstream 3′ splice site.   One of their functions is to act as sponges for microRNAs as some contain multiple binding sites for them.  Some cells contain 25,000 of them.

Viruses are known to hijack cellular proteins to use for their own ends.  It isn’t clear how the herpes viruses stimulate formation of hsa_circ_0001400, but use it they do, as it promotes viral latency,  cell cycle genes and inhibits apoptosis.

This another example of the RNA world which supposedly existed before the DNA world, like DOS under the Windows operating system (forgotten but not gone)

A moonlighting quorum sensing molecule

Bacteria talk to each other using quorum sensing molecules. Although the first one was found 50 years ago, the field really opened up with the work of Bonnie Bassler at Princeton in the 90s. These are small molecules which bacteria secrete, so that when there are a lot of bacteria around, the concentration of quorum sensors rises, allowing them to get into bacteria (by the law of mass action) changing gene expression for a variety of things, particularly virulence and biofilm formation. They have also been used by bacteria to compete with those of a different species.  There was a lot of hope, that we could control some nasty bugs (such as Pseudomonas) by messing about with their quorum sensors, but it hasn’t panned out. 

The real surprise came in a paper [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 118 e2012529118  ’21 ]showing that Pseudomonas uses one of its quorum sensing molecules (C12 < N-3-oxo-dodecanoyl) homoserine lactone > ) inside the eukaryotic cells it attacks. 

What it does once inside, is to attack a cellular organelle I’ve (and probably you) never heard of called vaults.  They’s been known since ’86, and given their size (12.9 megaDaltons) I’m surprised I’d never heard of them.  The likely reason is that no one knows what their function is. 

It is made of just 3 proteins

l. MVP — Major Vault Protein, mass 100 kiloDaltons 96 copies/vault

2. VPARP — Vault poly ADP ribose polymerase 190 kiloDaltons

3. Telomerase associated protein 290 kiloDaltons.

Human vaults contain 4 different RNAs (called, naturally enough vault RNAs < vtRNAs >).  They are 88 – 100 nucleotides long.  

Vaults look like a hand grenades and are 670 Angstroms long and 400 Angstroms in maximum diameter. 

[ Cell vol. 176 pp. 1054 – 1067 ’19 ] says that there can be 10,000 to 100,000 vaults/cell.  So why haven’t I seen them?

One of the vtRNAs binds to a protein involved in autophagy inhibiting it. This is an example of an RNA binding to a protein altering its function, something unusual until you think of the ribosome or the spliceosome. Starvation decreases the number of vaults inducing autophagy.

Once pseudomonas C12 gets into a cell it binds to the Major Vault Protein, causing its translocation into lipid rafts, the net effect being attenuation of the p38 protein kinase pathway to attenuate programmed cell death (apoptosis).  

So C12 keeps the cell alive when normally it would die.  A lot of recent work has shown that bacteria infiltrate cancers.  Do they do something similar to cancer cells to keep them alive. 

It really makes you humble (or should) to realize how many separate parts of cellular and molecular biology you must understand to even hope to understand how cells (and bacteria) go about their business. 

Think of how many terms were introduced to understand what the humble quorum sensor C12 is up to. 

Moonlighting molecules

Just when you thought you knew what your protein did, it goes off and does something completely different (and unexpected). This is called moonlighting, and is yet another reason drug discovery is hard. You can never be sure that your target is doing only what you think it’s doing.

Today’s example is PACAP, a neuromodulator/neurotransmitter made by neurons. Who knew that PACAP can and does act as an antibiotic when the brain is infected. [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 118 e1917623117 ’21 ] does (PNAS no longer pages its journals, as last year’s total was over 33,000 !).   PACAP is a member of the vasoactive intestinal polypeptide, secretin, glucagon family of neuropeptides (mammals have over 100 neuropeptides according to the paper).

PACAP stands for Pituitary Adenylate Cyclase Activating Polypeptide. It comes in two forms containing 27 or 38 amino acids, both cleaved from a 176 amino acid precursor. There are 3 receptors for PACAP, all G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs). A zillion functions have been ascribed to it, setting the circadian clock, protecting granule cells of the cerebellum. Outside the nervous system it is produced by immune cells in response to inflammatory conditions and antigenic stimulation. It is one of the most conserved neuropeptides throughout the course of evolution. Now we probably know why.

Showing how hard protein chemistry really is, PACAP is structurally similar to cathelicidin LL-37 an antimicrobial peptide, despite having less than 5% amino acid sequences in common. PACAP is cationic. Different sides of the protein have different characteristics, with one side being highly positively charged, and the other being hydrophobic (e.g. the protein is amphipathic). This is typical of antimicrobial peptides, and perturbation of microbial membranes by inducing negative Gaussian curvature probably explains its antibacterial activity.

In mouse models of Staph Aureus or Candida infections, PACAP is induced ‘up to’ 50 fold in the brain (or spleen or kidney) where it kills the bugs. Yet another reason drug discovery is so hard. We are mucking about in a system we barely understand.

There are many other examples of moonlighting proteins. Probably the best known is cytochrome c which is is a heme protein localized in the compartment between the inner and outer mitochondrial membranes where it functions to transfer electrons between complex III and complex IV of the respiratory chain. Oxidation and reduction of the iron atom in the heme along with movement along the mitochondrial intermembrane space allows it to schlep electrons between complexes of the respiratory chain.

All well and good. But cytochrome c also can tell a cell to commit suicide (apoptosis) when mitochondria are sufficiently damaged that cytochrome c can escape the intermembrane space. Who’d a thunk it?

How many more players are there in the cell (whose function we think we know) that are sneaking around — doing more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy?

Do we finally know what MYC is doing in cancer?

Tens of thousands of papers have been written on what MYC might be doing in cancer.  I’ve been reading about Myc for years, and my notes on Myc  contain 60,000+ characters. Cancer cells must love MYC as around 70% of human cancers overexpress the MYC protein, which is a transcription factor turning on the expression of at least 1,500 genes.  Others say 2,000 ( 10% of all protein coding genes).  “Whatever the latest trend in cancer biology — cell cycle, cell growth, apoptosis, metabolism, cancer stem cells, microRNAs, angiogenesis, inflammation — Myc is there regulating most of the key genes”  [ Cell vol. 151 pp. 11 – 13 ’12 ].   An intriguing theory is that Myc is part of the Matthew syndrome — Matthew 25:29
“For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance.”  Translating this into molecular biological terms, Myc acts to amplify the transcriptional state of any gene which is actively being transcribed.

The old idea that cells just up and died when they got sick, is pretty much gone.  There are various types of cell death, each of which has an intricately programmed mechanism — apoptosis, ferroptosis, pyroptosis, and necroptosis.  The latter is common on cancer, particularly when attacked by the immune system. [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 117 pp. 19982 – 19993 20 ] says that MYC acts as an antinecroptosis factor by inhibiting the interaction of RIPK1 and RIPK3 which goes on to trigger necroptosis. This may be why cancer cells so love MYC.  What is particularly fascinating (to neurologists at least) is that further along the path to necroptosis another protein (MLKL) forms cytoplasmic amyloid fibers as part of the process.  So here is a physiological use for amyloid (even though the net result is death).

Do not go gentle into that good night

Cells in the body dying of necroptosis obey Dylan Thomas — “Do not go gentle into that good night” all sorts of inflammation ensues around the cell, and systemically if enough die that way at once.

Cells dying from the first discovered form of programmed cell death e.g. apoptosis disobey.  They die very quietly producing no inflammation, and are quietly munched up by phagocytes.  Just how this happens has been a huge mystery.

Well one way to figure out what is going on looks at a phagocyte before it meets an apoptotic cell and afterwards.  Quite a bit it turns out.  The brute force technique looks at the changes in our 20,000 or so protein coding genes.  They found increased expression in 886 and decreased expression in 966, some 9% of our total.  How do you make sense of that.

This is typical of the brute force approach to any condition (e.g. cancer, infection, vascular disease), and shows you just how hard it is to figure out what is going on from the mass of data produced.

The authors of Nature vol. 580 pp. 130 – 135 ’20 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2121-3.pdf) were far cleverer than that.  What they did was cause a bunch of cells to go apoptotic at once and then the “supernatants and cell pellets from apoptotic cells and live cell controls were subjected to untargeted metabolomic profiling against a library of more than 3,000 biochemical features or compounds.”

Then by a huge amount of work they found 6 metabolites released by the apoptotic cell  which when given together which could switch macrophages (a type of phagocyte)to the non-inflammatory state (e.g. the one above producing all those gene changes).

Then they pared the number of metabolites doing this down to 3 (spermidine, guanosine monophosphate and inosine monophosphate). They call this cocktail of metabolites MEMIX-3.

They get out of the cell dying of apoptosis because the executioner (caspase) chops up a protein channel on the cell surface (pannexin1), allowing the 6 metabolites to escape.  A rather parsimonious suicide note wouldn’t you think.

It gets better. MEMIX-3 obviously is an anti-inflammatory agent, and they showed that it attenuates arthritic symptoms and prevents rejection of a lung transplant.

Brilliant work, and possibly one of great therapeutic import.

The other uses of amyloid (not all bad)

Neurologists and drug chemists pretty much view amyloid as a bad thing.  It is the major component of the senile plaque of Alzheimer’s disease, and when deposited in nerve causes amyloidotic polyneuropathy.  A recent paper and editorial casts amyloid in a different light [ Cell vol. 173 pp. 1068 – 1070, 1244 – 2253 ’18 ].  However if amyloid is so bad why do cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex viruses and E. Coli make proteins to prevent a type of amyloid from forming.

Cell death isn’t what it used to be.  Back in the day, they just died when things didn’t go well.  Now we know there are a variety of ways that cells die, and all of them have rather specific mechanisms.  Apoptosis (aka programmed cell death) is a mechanism of cell death used widely during embryonic development.  It allows the cell to die very quietly without causing inflammation.  Necroptosis is entirely different, it is another type of programmed cell death, designed to cause inflammation — bringing the immune system in to attack invading pathogens.

Two proteins (Receptor Interacting Protein Kinase 1 — RIPK1, and RIPK3) bind to each other forming amyloid, that looks for all the world like typical amyloid –it binds Congo Red, shows crossBeta diffraction and has a filamentous appearance.  Fascinating chemistry aside, the amyloid formed is crucial for necroptosis to occur, which is why various bugs try to prevent it.

The paper above describes the structure of the amyloid formed — unusual in itself, because until now amyloid was thought to involve the aggregation of a single protein.

The proteins are large: RIPK1 contains 671 amino acids, and RIPK3 contains 518.  They  both contain RHIMs (Receptor interacting protein Homotypic Interaction Motifs) which are fairly large themselves (amino acids 496 – 583 of RIPK1 and 388 – 518 of RIPK3).  Yet the amyloid the two proteins form use a very small stretches (amino acids 532 – 543 from RIPK1 and 451 – 462 from RIPK3).  How the rest of these large proteins pack around the beta strands of the 11 amino acid stretches isn’t discussed in the paper.  Even within these stretches, it is two consensus tetrapeptides (IQIG from RIPK1, and VQVG from RIPK3) that do most of the binding.

Even if you assume that I (Isoleucine) Q (glutamine) G (glycine) V (valine) occur at a frequency of 5%, in our proteome of 20,000 proteins assuming a length of amino acids IQIG and VQVG should occur 10 times each.  This may explain why 300/20,000 of our proteins contain a 100 amino acid  segment called BRICHOS which acts as a chaperone preventing amyloid formation. For details see — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2018/04/01/a-research-idea-yours-for-the-taking/.

Just another reason to take up the research idea in the link and find out just what other things amyloid is doing within our cells in the course of their normal functioning.

 

Is a rational treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome at hand?

If an idea of mine is correct, it is possible that some patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) can be treated with specific medications based on the results of a few blood tests. This is precision medicine at its finest.  The data to test this idea has already been acquired, and nothing further needs to be done except to analyze it.

Athough the initial impetus for the idea happened only 3 months ago, there have been enough twists and turns that the best way explanation is by a timeline.

First some background:

As a neurologist I saw a lot of people who were chronically tired and fatigued, because neurologists deal with muscle weakness and diseases like myasthenia gravis which are associated with fatigue.  Once I ruled out neuromuscular disease as a cause, I had nothing to offer then (nor did medicine).  Some of these patients were undoubtedly neurotic, but there was little question in my mind that many others had something wrong that medicine just hadn’t figured out yet — not that it hasn’t been trying.

Infections of almost any sort are associated with fatigue, most probably caused by components of the inflammatory response.  Anyone who’s gone through mononucleosis knows this.    The long search for an infectious cause of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has had its ups and downs — particularly downs — see https://luysii.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/evil-scientists-create-virus-causing-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-in-lab/

At worst many people with these symptoms are written off as crazy; at best, diagnosed as depressed  and given antidepressants.  The fact that many of those given antidepressants feel better is far from conclusive, since most patients with chronic illnesses are somewhat depressed.

The 1 June 2017 Cell had a long and interesting review of cellular senescence by Norman Sharpless [ vol. 169 pp. 1000 – 1011 ].  Here is some background about the entity.  If you are familiar with senescent cell biology skip to the paragraph marked **** below

Cells die in a variety of ways.  Some are killed (by infections, heat, toxins).  This is called necrosis. Others voluntarily commit suicide (this is called apoptosis).   Sometimes a cell under stress undergoes cellular senescence, a state in which it doesn’t die, but doesn’t reproduce either.  Such cells have a variety of biochemical characteristics — they are resistant to apoptosis, they express molecules which prevent them from proliferating and — most importantly — they secrete a variety of proinflammatory molecules collectively called the Senescence Associated Secretory Phenotype — SASP).

At first the very existence of the senescent state was questioned, but exist it does.  What is it good for?  Theories abound, one being that mutation is one cause of stress, and stopping mutated cells from proliferating prevents cancer. However, senescent cells are found during fetal life; and they are almost certainly important in wound healing.  They are known to accumulate the older you get and some think they cause aging.

Many stresses induce cellular senescence of which mutation is but one.  The one of interest to us is chemotherapy for cancer, something obviously good as a cancer cell turned senescent has stopped proliferating.   If you know anyone who has undergone chemotherapy, you know that fatigue is almost invariable.

****

One biochemical characteristic of the senescent cell is increased levels of a protein called p16^INK4a, which helps stop cellular proliferation.  While p16^INK4a can easily be measured in tissue biopsies, tissue biopsies are inherently invasive. Fortunately, p16^INK4a can also be measured in circulating blood cells.

What caught my eye in the Cell paper was a reference to a paper about cancer [ Cancer Discov. vol. 7 pp. 165 – 176 ’17 ] by M. Demaria, in which the levels of p16^INK4a correlated with the degree of fatigue after chemotherapy.  The more p16^INK4a in the blood cells the greater the fatigue.

I may have been the only reader of both papers with clinical experience wth chronic fatigue syndrome.  It is extremely difficult to objectively measure a subjective complaint such as fatigue.

As an example of the difficulty in correlating subjective complaints with objective findings, consider the nearly uniform complaint of difficulty thinking in depression, with how such patients actually perform on cognitive tests — e. g. there is  little if any correlation between complaints and actual performance — here’s a current reference — Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 3901(2017) —  doi:10.1038/s41598-017-04353.

If the results of the Cancer paper could be replicated, p16^INK4 would be the first objective measure of a patient’s individual sense of fatigue.

So I wrote both authors, suggesting that the p16^INK4a test be run on a collection of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) patients. Both authors replied quickly, but thought the problem would be acquiring patients.  Demaria said that Sharpless had a lab all set up to do the test.

Then fate (in the form of Donald Trump) supervened.  A mere 9 days after the Cell issue appeared, Sharpless was nominated to be the head of the National Cancer Institute by President Trump.  This meant Dr. Sharpless had far bigger fish to fry, and he would have to sever all connection with his lab because of conflict of interest considerations.

I also contacted a patient organization for chronic fatigue syndrome without much success.  Their science advisor never responded.

There matters stood until 22 August when a paper and an editorial about it came out [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 114 pp. 8914 – 8916, E7150 – E7158 ’17 ].  The paper represented a tremendous amount of data (and work).  The blood levels of 51 cytokines (measures of inflammation) and adipokines (hormones released by fat) were measured in both 192 patients with CFS (which can only be defined by symptoms) and 293 healthy controls matched for age and gender.

In this paper, levels of 17 of the 51 cytokines correlated with severity of CFS. This is a striking similarity with the way the p16^INK4 levels correlated with the degree of fatigue after chemotherapy).  So I looked up the individual elements of the SASP (which can be found in Annu Rev Pathol. 21010; 5: 99–118.)  There are 74 of them. I wondered how many of the 51 cytokines measured in the PNAS paper were in the SASP.  This is trickier than it sounds as many cytokines have far more than one name.  The bottom line is that 20 SASPs are in the 51 cytokines measured in the paper.

If the fatigue of CFS is due to senescent cells and the SASPs  they release, then they should be over-represented in the 17 of the 51 cytokines correlating with symptom severity.  Well they are; 9 out of the 17 are SASP.  However although suggestive, this increase is not statistically significant (according to my consultants on Math Stack Exchange).

After wrote I him about the new work, Dr. Sharpless noted that CFS is almost certainly a heterogeneous condition. As a clinician with decades of experience, I’ve certainly did see some of the more larcenous members of our society who used any subjective diagnosis to be compensated, as well as a variety of individuals who just wanted to withdraw from society, for whatever reason. They are undoubtedly contaminating the sample in the paper. Dr. Sharpless thought the idea, while interesting, would be very difficult to test.

But it wouldn’t at all.  Not with the immense amount of data in the PNAS paper.

Here’s how. Take each of the 9 SASPs and see how their levels correlate with the other 16 (in each of the 192 CSF patients). If they correlate better with SASPs than with nonSASPs, than this would be evidence for senescent cells being the cause some cases of CFS. In particular, patients with a high level of any of the 9 SASPs should be studied for such correlations.  Doing so should weed out some of the heterogeneity of the 192 patients in the sample.

This is why the idea is testable and, even better, falsifiable, making it a scientific hypothesis (a la Karl Popper).  The data to refute it is in the possession of the authors of the paper.

Suppose the idea turns out to be correct and that some patients with CFS are in fact that way because, for whatever reason, they have a lot of senescent cells releasing SASPs.

This would mean that it would be time to start trials of senolyic drugs which destroy senescent cells on the group with elevated SASPs. Fortunately, a few senolytics are currently inc linical use.  This would be precision medicine at its finest.

Being able to alleviate the symptoms of CFS would be worthwhile in itself, but SASP levels could also be run on all sorts of conditions associated with fatigue, most notably infection. This might lead to symptomatic treatment at least.  Having gone through mono in med school, I would have loved to have been able to take something to keep me from falling asleep all the time.

How to (possibly) diagnose and treat chronic fatigue syndrome (myalgic encephalomyelitis)

As a neurologist I saw a lot of people who were chronically tired and fatigued, because neurologists deal with muscle weakness and diseases like myasthenia gravis which are associated with fatigue.  Once I ruled out neuromuscular disease as a cause, I had nothing to offer then (nor did medicine).  Some were undoubtedly neurotic, but there was little question in my mind that some of them had something wrong that medicine just hadn’t figured out.  Not it hasn’t been trying.

Infections of almost any sort are associated with fatigue, probably because components of the inflammatory response cause it.  Anyone who’s gone through mononucleosis knows this.    The long search for an infectious cause of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has had its ups and downs — particularly downs — see https://luysii.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/evil-scientists-create-virus-causing-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-in-lab/

At worst many people with these symptoms are written off as crazy; at best, depressed  and given antidepressants.  The fact that many of those given antidepressants feel better is far from conclusive, since most patients with chronic illnesses are somewhat depressed.

Even if we didn’t have a treatment, just having a test which separated sufferers from normal people would at least be of some psychological help, by telling them that they weren’t nuts.

Two recent papers may actually have the answer. Although neither paper dealt with chronic fatigue syndrome directly, and I can find no studies in the literature linking what I’m about to describe to CFS they at least imply that there could be a diagnostic test for CFS, and a possible treatment as well.

Because I expect that many people with minimal biological background will be reading this, I’ll start by describing the basic biology of cellular senescence and death

Background:  Most cells in our bodies are destined to die long before we do. Neurons are the longest lasting (essentially as long as we do).  The lining of the intestines is renewed weekly.  No circulating blood cell lasts more than half a year.

Cells die in a variety of ways.  Some are killed (by infections, heat, toxins).  This is called necrosis. Others voluntarily commit suicide (this is called apoptosis).   Sometimes a cell under stress undergoes cellular senescence, a state in which it doesn’t die, but doesn’t reproduce either.  Such cells have a variety of biochemical characteristics — they are resistant to apoptosis, they express molecules which prevent them from proliferating and most importantly, they secrete proinflammatory molecules (this is called the Senescence Associated Secretory Phenotype — SASP).

At first the very existence of the senescent state was questioned, but exist it does.  What is it good for?  Theories abound, one being that mutation is one cause of stress, and stopping mutated cells from proliferating prevents cancer. However, senescent cells are found during fetal life; and they are almost certainly important in wound healing.  They are known to accumulate the older you get and some think they cause aging.

Many stresses induce cellular senescence.  The one of interest to us is chemotherapy for cancer, something obviously good as a cancer cell turned senescent has stopped proliferating.   If you know anyone who has undergone chemotherapy, you know that fatigue is almost invariable.

One biochemical characteristic of the senescent cell is increased levels of a protein called p16^INK4a, which helps stop cellular proliferation.  While p16^INK4a can easily be measured in tissue biopsies, tissue biopsies are inherently not easy. Fortunately it can also be measured in circulating blood cells.

The following study — Cancer Discov. vol. 7 pp. 165 – 176 ’17 looked at 89 women with breast cancer undergoing chemotherapy. They correlated the amount of fatigue experienced with the levels of p16^INK4a in a type of circulating white blood cell (T lymphocyte).  There was a 44% incidence of fatigue in the highest quartile of  p16^INK4a levels, vs. a 5% incidence of fatigue in the lowest. The cited paper didn’t mention CFS nor did the highly technical but excellent review on which much of the above is based [ Cell vol. 169 pp. 1000 -1011 ’17 ]

But it is definitely time to measure p16^INK4a levels in patients with chronic fatigue and compare them to people without it.  This may be the definitive diagnostic test, if people with CFS show higher levels of p16^INK4a.

If this turns out to be the case, then there is a logical therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome.  As mentioned above, senescent cells are resistant to apoptosis (voluntary suicide).  What stops these cells from suicide? Naturally occurring cellular suicide inhibitors (with names like BCL2, BCL-XL, BCL-W) do so .  Drugs called sensolytics already exist to target the inhibitors causing senescent cells to commit suicide.

So if excessive senescent cells are the cause of CFS, then killing them should make things better. Sensolytics do exist but there are problems; one couldn’t be used because of side effects.  Others do exist (one such is Venetoclax) and have been approved by the FDA for leukemia — but it isn’t as potent .

So there is a potentially both a diagnostic test and a treatment for CFS.

The initial experiment should be fairly easy for research to do — just corral some CSF patients and controls and run a test for p16^INK4a levels in their blood cells. Also easy on the patients as only a blood draw is involved.

This, in itself, would be great, but there is far more to think about. 

If CFS patients have too many senescent cells, getting rid of them — although (hopefully) symptomatically beneficial — will not get rid of what caused the senescent cells to accumulate in the first place. In addition, getting rid of all of them at once would probably cause huge problems causing something similar to the tumor lysis syndrome – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumor_lysis_syndrome.

But these are problems CFS patients and their physicians would love to have.

Are you sure you know everything your protein is up to?

Just because you know one function of a protein doesn’t mean you know them all. A recent excellent review of the (drumroll) executioner caspases [ Neuron vol. 88 pp. 461 – 474 ’15 ] brings this to mind. Caspases control a form of cell death called apoptosis, in which a cell goes gently into the good night without causing a fuss (particularly inflammation and alerting the immune system that something bad killed it). They are enzymes which chop up other proteins and cause the activation of other proteins which chop up DNA. They cause the inner leaflet of the plasma membrane to expose itself (particularly phosphatidyl serine which tells nearby scavenger cells to ‘eat me’).

The answer to the mathematical puzzle in the previous post will be found at the end of this one.

In addition to containing an excellent review of the various steps turning caspases on and off, the review talks about all the things activated caspases do in the nervous system without killing the neuron containing them. Among them are neurite outgrowth and regeneration of peripheral nerve axons after transection. Well that’s pathology, but one executioner caspase (caspase3) is involved in the millisecond to millisecond functioning of the nervous system — e.g. long term depression of neurons (LTD), something quite important to learning.

Of course, such potentially lethal activity must be under tight control, and there are 8 inhibitors of apoptosis (IAPs) of which 3 bind the executioners. We also have inhibitors of IAPs (SMAC, HTRA2) — wheels within wheels.

Are there any other examples where a protein discovered by one of its functions turns out to have others. Absolutely. One example is cytochrome c, which was found as it shuttles electrons to complex IVin the electron transport chain of mitochondria.Certainly a crucial function. However, when the mitochondria stops functioning either because it is told to or something bad happens, cytochrome c is released from mitochondria into the cytoplasm where it then activates caspase3, one of the executioner caspases.

Here’s another. Enzymes which hook amino acids onto tRNA are called tRNA synthases (aaRs for some reason). However one of the (called EPRS) when phosphorylated due to interferon gamma activity, became part of a complex of proteins which silences specific genes (translation — stops the gene from being transcribed) involved in the inflammatory response.

Yet another tRNA synthase, when released from the cell triggers an inflammatory response.

Naturally molecular biologists have invented a fancy word for the process of evolving a completely different function for a molecule — exaptation (to contrast it with adaptation).

Note the word molecule — exaptation isn’t confined to proteins. [ Cell vol. 160 pp. 554 – 566 ’15 ] Discusses exaptation as something which happens to promoters and enhancers. This work looked at the promoters and enhancers active in the liver in 20 mammalian species — all the enhancers were rapidly evolving.

——–

Answer to the mathematical puzzle of the previous post. R is the set of 4 straight lines bounding a square centered at (0,0)

Here’s why proving it has an inside and an outside isn’t enough to prove the Jordan Curve Theorem

No. The argument for R uses its geometry (the boundary is made of straight
line segments). The problem is that an embedding f: S^1 -> R^2 may be
convoluted, say something of the the Hilbert curve sort.

Never stop thinking, never stop looking for an angle

Derek Lowe may soon be a very rich man if he owns some Vertex stock. An incredible pair of papers in the current Nature (vol. 505 pp. 492 – 493, 509 – 514 ’14, Science (vol 343 pp. 38 – 384, 428 – 432 ’14) has come up with a completely new way of possibly treating AIDs. Instead of attacking the virus, attack the cells it infects, and let them live (or at least die differently).

Now for some background. Cells within us are dying all the time. Red cells die within half a year, the cells in the lining of your gut die within a week and are replaced. None of this causes inflammation, and the cells die very quietly and are munched up by white cells. They even send out a signal to the white cells called an ‘eat me’ signal. The process is called apoptosis. It occurs big time during embryonic development, particularly in the nervous system. Neurons failing to make strong enough contacts effectively kill themselves.

Apoptosis is also called programmed cell death — the cell literally kills itself using enzymes called caspases to break down proteins, and other proteins to break down DNA.

We have evolved other ways for cell death to occur. Consider a cell infected by a bacterium or a virus. We don’t want it to go quietly. We want a lot of inflammatory white cells to get near it and mop up any organisms around. This type of cell death is called pyroptosis. It also uses caspases, but a different set.

You just can’t get away from teleological thinking in biology. We are always asking ‘what’s it for?’ Chemistry and physics can never answer questions like this. We’re back at the Cartesian dichotomy.

Which brings us to an unprecedented way to treat AIDS (or even prevent it).

As anyone conscious for the past 30 years knows, the AIDS virus (aka Human Immunodeficiency Virus 1 aka HIV1) destroys the immune system. It does so in many ways, but the major brunt of the disease falls on a type of white cell called a helper T cell. These cells carry a protein called CD4 on their surface, so for years docs have been counting their number as a prognostic sign, and, in earlier days, to tell them when to start treatment.

We know HIV1 infects CD4 positive (CD4+) T cells and kills them. What the papers show, is that this isn’t the way that most CD4+ cells die. Most (the papers estimate 95%) CD4+ cells die of an abortive HIV1 infection — the virus gets into the cell, starts making some of its DNA, and then the pyroptosis response occurs, causing inflammation, attracting more and more immune cells, which then get infected.

This provides a rather satisfying explanation of the chronic inflammation seen in AIDS in lymph nodes.

Vertex has a drug VX-765 which inhibits the caspase responsible for pyroptosis, but not those responsible for apoptosis. The structure is available (http://www.medkoo.com/Anticancer-trials/VX-765.html), and it looks like a protease inhibitor. Even better, VX-765 been used in humans (in phase II trials for something entirely different). It was well tolerated for 6 weeks anyway. Clearly, a lot more needs to be done before it’s brought to the FDA — how safe is it after a year, what are the long term side effects. But imagine that you could give this to someone newly infected with essentially normal CD4+ count to literally prevent the immunodeficiency, even if you weren’t getting rid of the virus.

Possibly a great advance. I love the deviousness of it all. Don’t attack the virus, but prevent cells it infects from dying in a particular way.

Never stop thinking. Hats off to those who thought of it.