Ubiquitin

By Yoskaly Lazo-Fernandez, PhD

By Yoskaly Lazo-Fernandez, PhD

By Christina Towers, PhD

The neurodegenerative disorder, Alzheimer's disease, is responsible for 60 to 80% of all dementia cases.¹   Neurodegeneration occurs in response to the accumulation of amyloid-β plaques and neurofibrillary tangles composed of hyperphosphorylated tau.

Epigenetic mechanisms have been implicated in many physiological and pathophysiological processes. Among these, histone modifications including methylation, phosphorylation, acetylation and ubiquitination, significantly modify gene expression.

The protein PINK1 is a mitochondrial-located serine/threonine kinase (PTK) that maintains organelle function and integrity. It not only protects organelles from cellular stress, but it also uses the selective auto-phagocytosis process for cleaning and clearing cell damage. Exner et al initially reported that, in humans, a PINK1 deficiency is linked to autosomal recessive incidences of both neurodegenerative pathology and Parkinson's Disease (PD) (1).

Ubiquitin is an abundant and essential cellular 9-kd protein that is conserved across evolution from yeast to humans. Ubiquitin is used by cells as a covalent modifier of other proteins both to activate their function and to target them for degradation, depending on the degree of ubiquitination.

Ubiquitin is a small, highly conserved protein which plays an important role in protein breakdown, covalently bonding to proteins to mark them for proteolytic degradation in a process called ubiquitination. Ubiquitin also binds to inclusion bodies (accumulations of protein) in pathological conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's disease.

Novus Biologicals offers an extensive antibody catalog targeting heat shock proteins (HSPs). A large protein group covering a number of families, the HSPs are functionally related by their dramatic upregulation in response to stress. Stress triggers may include a rise in temperature or a similar environmental cause. Transcription is controlled by the heat shock factor, or HSF, protein family.

E3 ubiquitin ligases are standards in most antibody catalogs. These proteins are essential to the process of ubiquitination, which is expressed in protein pathways throughout the body and is often linked to disease states. It is widely used as a biomarker, with ubiquitin antibodies being widely used to identify the protein accumulations (inclusion bodies) which occur in conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington's disease.