TP53 / P53 single amino acid variants completely alter cancer progression!

 

Not a lot of proteomics in this new paper, but it's a seriously big deal. 

P53 (or TP53) is one of best arguments for why we do proteomics. P53 is a bigtime central driver of cell cycle and in a normal cell it goes "STOP STOP STOP SOMETHING IS WRONG" when something is wrong. In a cancer cell, various mechanisms end up tricking it so it doesn't know thngs are wrong and it just lets a damaged cell keep on dividing and passing that damage on.

It's a big deal for us because P53 is regulated by degradation, not by transcription/translation. The number of transcripts are worse than pointless. They're misleading. Source: My first postdoc was trying to figure out what a recently discovered protein called the P53 binding protein number 1 actually did. That was a very long time ago, so please excuse if I forgot everything. 

BUT the point of that last ramble is that we've been studying P53 for decades and it is really really really important. So -- new single amino acid variants that dramatically alter how devastating a tumor is - is both a surprise and a very big deal.