Back

Identification of a new Plasmodium falciparum E2 ubiquitin conjugating enzyme

Smith, C.; Hajisadeghian, M.; van der Heden van Noort, G. J.; Pinto-Fernandez, A.; Kessler, B. M.; Artavanis-Tsakonas, K.

2024-10-06 cell biology
10.1101/2024.10.06.616869 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) is essential for Plasmodium falciparum survival and represents a potential target for antimalarial therapies. We utilised a ubiquitin-activity based probe (Ub-Dha) to capture active components of the ubiquitin conjugating machinery during asexual blood-stage development. Several E2 ubiquitin-conjugating enzymes, the E1 activating enzyme, and the HECT E3 ligase PfHEUL were identified and validated through in vitro ubiquitination assays. We also demonstrate selective functional interactions between PfHEUL and a subset of both human and P. falciparum E2s. Additionally, the Ub-Dha probe captured an uncharacterized protein, PF3D7_0811400 (C0H4U0) with no known homology to ubiquitin-pathway enzymes in other organisms. Through structural and biochemical analysis, we validate it as a novel E2 enzyme, capable of binding ubiquitin in a cysteine-specific manner. These findings contribute to our understanding of the P. falciparum UPS, identifying promising novel drug targets and highlighting the evolutionary uniqueness of the Ub-proteasome system in this parasite.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.