Monday, December 21, 2015

PTMs in centromeres!


I had to dig deep in my brain and then finally just look at Google Images to remember what a centromere is and why its important.  Hopefully the nice sketch I found above clarifies it for you as well. Cause its the protein that holds chromosomes together. Its gonna be deeply involved in cell/chromosome division, sexual reproduction and probably all sorts of other things.

In this new paper from Aaron Bailey et al., in press (and currently open access) at MCP this group looked at the post-translational modifications that can show up on these important proteins.

They started with a HeLa cell line that had a stable affinity tag at some centromere and then immunoprecipitated to get at their proteins of interest. Chemicals were used to arrest the cells in certain stages of mitosis or something. Multiple enzymes, including LysC and AspN were used to get big chunks of the cleaned up protein for effective PTM identification and localization.

What did they find?


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