UPS - It's not just for packages!

Happy Monday internet! I hope you all are having a great start to the week - I know I am! The Lasker Foundation announced today that the recipient of the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award would be awarded to Dr. Kazutoshi Mori from Kyoto University and Dr. Peter Walter from the University of California, San Francisco for their work on the unfolded protein response. This award, often known as the "American Nobel", is one of the highest awards that can be given to a scientist.

Figure 1: Living that science life

The unfolded protein response, or UPS, is an important process that cells carry out to maintain their internal environment. For any protein to function properly, they must be folded in a specific way. To put this in another way, imagine a nail buried halfway into a block of wood. If I gave you a saw and a hammer, both of the same weight, which would you use to pound the nail into the wood?

Even if you had no idea what a saw and hammer were typically used for, you would probably discover quite quickly that the hammer is an ideal tool for driving that nail further into the block. One of the cardinal rules in biology is that structure dictates function. Your proteins are the same way - they must be folded and shaped in a way that best suits their eventual function. But if proteins are folded improperly, this is a bad thing. In reference to the previous example, if the hammer head was forged in such a way that it resembled a cork screw, it would certainly not be able to do its job very effectively!

Figure 2: Yikes.

If your hammer factory was producing hammers in such a fashion, you'd probably want to halt the production of the faulty hammers, get rid of the faulty hammers you already have and hire someone a bit more competent to create better hammers! The goals of the UPS are the same:

1. Stop the translation or new proteins 2. Degrade misfolded proteins 3. Increase the production of chaperones, which are proteins that assist in protein folding.

How each of these steps occur and are regulated are beyond the scope of this post, but just remember: your cells are always hard at work making sure that you are healthy and happy! So the next time you're feeling like you don't want to get out of bed on a Monday morning, just remember that your cells have been hard at work all night so that you can tackle your week!

For more information on how to tackle difficult production situations, please see the following educational film produced by Ball et al. in 1952.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NPzLBSBzPI