Sunday, October 27, 2013

Sirtuin (Sirt6/Sirt7) proteomics!


Sirtuins are genes/proteins of significant interest these days?  Why you ask?  Because they seem to be key regulators of the aging functions in Eukaryotes and a lot of us self-aware and self-centered beings out there would rather not die, nor suffer age-linked fun restrictions!
Knock out SIRTs and you totally mess up the yeast life cycle.
The same holds for mice (as shown above and stolen from the Nature paper clicking on the picture will take you to) But no one really seems to know why yet.  We have their in vitro functional activities all worked out, but there doesn't appear to be a clear link between what they're doing and the complex breakdown of senescence (programmed aging!)

Sounds like a job for proteomics!  Nuts.  I photoshopped a Q Exactive wearing a superman cape and symbol a while back for a talk I gave in Seoul, but I can't seem to find it right now.  I'll add it later!  Nevermind (I made a new one!)  I need a hobby.  This study didn't even use a QE....



Two really nice papers in press at MCP now take a swing at the functions of SIRT7 and SIRT6.
In the SIRT6 paper, "A proteomic perspective of SIRT6 phosphorylations and interactions...," by Miteva and Cristea out of Princeton, this team goes after human SIRT6 using an impressive array of molecular techniques.  The proteomics are flushed out by an Orbitrap XL and Velos.

In "SIRT7 plays a role in ribosome biogenesis and protein synthesis," Yuan-Chin Tsai, et.al., out of the same group uses a similar approach to study SIRT7 knockdowns with an Orbitrap Velos.  Again, this lab demonstrates a remarkable mastery of a wide variety of molecular skills, employing top notch microscopy, genetic techniques and proteomics to really make their case and demonstrate more about the pathways of these proteins than we knew ever knew before.

If this is your field, or you just want to see proteomics seemlessly integrated into a comprehensive pathway study, I suggest you download one or both of these nice new papers.  The links above are to the Early release abstracts and won't be there forever.





No comments:

Post a Comment