Publications by authors named "Natalie Romanov"

Ribosomes translate the genetic code into proteins. Recent technical advances have facilitated in situ structural analyses of ribosome functional states inside eukaryotic cells and the minimal bacterium Mycoplasma. However, such analyses of Gram-negative bacteria are lacking, despite their ribosomes being major antimicrobial drug targets.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Autophagy is initiated by the assembly of multiple autophagy-related proteins that form the phagophore assembly site where autophagosomes are formed. Atg13 is essential early in this process, and a hub of extensive phosphorylation. How these multiple phosphorylations contribute to autophagy initiation, however, is not well understood.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Various cellular quality control mechanisms, like ribosome-associated chaperones, help maintain proteostasis by preventing misfolding of proteins during translation.
  • This study hypothesizes that importins, which usually assist in transporting proteins into the nucleus, might also bind to newly formed protein chains during translation, rather than just after.
  • By analyzing all importins in yeast, the researchers found some that associate with potentially unstable proteins, indicating that importins and other chaperones work together to ensure proper protein folding and prevent aggregation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • During protein synthesis, fully made protein subunits interact with newly forming partner proteins, which is key for efficient assembly but not fully understood.
  • Researchers investigated specific structural features in nucleoporins that might aid this co-translational assembly and found new interactions.
  • Their findings revealed that certain motifs enable selective interactions with proteins that often participate in multiple complexes, suggesting a complex regulatory dynamic in how proteins assemble during synthesis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Environmental cues can change cellular behavior traditionally through kinases (activators) and phosphatases (antagonists), but this study highlights a phosphatase-driven mechanism that induces phosphorylation instead.
  • Using Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the research shows that the inhibition of a specific phosphatase (PP2A-Cdc55) by Endosulfine triggers a phosphorylation response without the activation of kinases.
  • This phosphatase-centric signaling approach challenges the conventional view, suggesting that phosphatases can act as key effectors in cellular responses, influencing various processes vital for surviving stress.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Inspired by recent proteomic data demonstrating the upregulation of carbon and glycogen metabolism in aging human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HPCs, CD34+ cells), this report addresses whether this is caused by elevated glycolysis of the HPCs on a per cell basis, or by a subpopulation that has become more glycolytic. The average glycogen content in individual CD34+ cells from older subjects (> 50 years) was 3.5 times higher and more heterogeneous compared to younger subjects (< 35 years).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A progressive loss of protein homeostasis is characteristic of aging and a driver of neurodegeneration. To investigate this process quantitatively, we characterized proteome dynamics during brain aging in the short-lived vertebrate Nothobranchius furzeri combining transcriptomics and proteomics. We detected a progressive reduction in the correlation between protein and mRNA, mainly due to post-transcriptional mechanisms that account for over 40% of the age-regulated proteins.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Modern quantitative mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics enables researchers to unravel signaling networks by monitoring proteome-wide cellular responses to different stimuli. MS-based analysis of signaling systems usually requires an integration of multiple quantitative MS experiments, which remains challenging, given that the overlap between these datasets is not necessarily comprehensive. In a previous study we analyzed the impact of the yeast mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) Hog1 on the hyperosmotic stress-affected phosphorylome.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Proteotypes, like genotypes, have been found to vary between individuals in several studies, but consistent molecular functional traits across studies remain to be quantified. In a meta-analysis of 11 proteomics datasets from humans and mice, we use co-variation of proteins in known functional modules across datasets and individuals to obtain a consensus landscape of proteotype variation. We find that individuals differ considerably in both protein complex abundances and stoichiometry.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Diminishing potential to replace damaged tissues is a hallmark for ageing of somatic stem cells, but the mechanisms remain elusive. Here, we present proteome-wide atlases of age-associated alterations in human haematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HPCs) and five other cell populations that constitute the bone marrow niche. For each, the abundance of a large fraction of the ~12,000 proteins identified is assessed in 59 human subjects from different ages.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Mammals display a wide range of variation in their lifespan. Investigating the molecular networks that distinguish long- from short-lived species has proven useful to identify determinants of longevity. Here, we compared the livers of young and old long-lived naked mole-rats (NMRs) and the phylogenetically closely related, shorter-lived, guinea pigs using an integrated omics approach.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Quantitative mass spectrometry has established proteome-wide regulation of protein abundance and post-translational modifications in various biological processes. Here, we used quantitative mass spectrometry to systematically analyze the thermal stability and solubility of proteins on a proteome-wide scale during the eukaryotic cell cycle. We demonstrate pervasive variation of these biophysical parameters with most changes occurring in mitosis and G1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The arrangement of proteins into complexes is a key organizational principle for many cellular functions. Although the topology of many complexes has been systematically analyzed in isolation, their molecular sociology remains elusive. Here, we show that crude cellular extracts of a eukaryotic thermophile, , retain basic principles of cellular organization.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Yeast lacks dedicated photoreceptors; however, blue light still causes pronounced oscillations of the transcription factor Msn2 into and out of the nucleus. Here we show that this poorly understood phenomenon is initiated by a peroxisomal oxidase, which converts light into a hydrogen peroxide (HO) signal that is sensed by the peroxiredoxin Tsa1 and transduced to thioredoxin, to counteract PKA-dependent Msn2 phosphorylation. Upon HO, the nuclear retention of PKA catalytic subunits, which contributes to delayed Msn2 nuclear concentration, is antagonized in a Tsa1-dependent manner.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The budding yeast reacts to increased external osmolarity by modifying many cellular processes. Adaptive signaling relies primarily on the high-osmolarity glycerol (HOG) pathway, which is closely related to the mammalian p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway in core architecture. To identify target proteins of the MAPK Hog1, we designed a mass spectrometry-based high-throughput experiment to measure the impact of Hog1 activation or inhibition on the phosphoproteome.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

is an important model organism and pathogen. This proteome overview details shared and specific proteins and selected virulence-relevant protein complexes from representative strains of all three major clades. To determine the strain distribution and major clades we used a refined strain comparison combining ribosomal RNA, MLST markers, and looking at highly-conserved regions shared between strains.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF