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by Vivienne Baillie Gerritsen

You've arrived at the supermarket, and your trolley token is missing. It's not where you usually keep it - on your keyring, or in your bag. Flustered, you search for something to replace it. A coin of sorts. What you find, thank goodness, fits. So, you pull your trolley away from its fellow partners feeling both relieved and gratified. What you have just done is put something right that could have gone wrong. And you did it by way of an intermediate that mimicked what lacked. Situations such as these sometimes occur inside us. Enzymes may be temporarily out of order - not because something has gone wrong with them but because their substrate is lacking. As a result, they do nothing. This has been shown to happen to UXS1, an enzyme involved in forming part of our extracellular matrix which is crucial to our well-being. In the absence of an intermediate compound (UDP-4-ketoxylose), UXS1 remains inactive - which can create downstream complications. However, researchers discovered that a second enzyme, TGDS, comes to the rescue by producing an intermediate (UDP-4-keto-6-deoxyglucose) that is able to replace the one that is missing. UXS1 is thus revived and can resume its role.

Protein Spotlight (ISSN 1424-4721) is a monthly review written by the Swiss-Prot team of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. Spotlight articles describe a specific protein or family of proteins on an informal tone. Follow us: Subscribe · Facebook · Linkedin

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"La vie, l'amour, la mort & les protéines" (in French only) is a wonderful and unique collection of twenty comic strips created with cartoonist aloys lolo. Each comic describes one protein taken from the Protein Spotlight articles. The album was published in November 2023 by Antipodes, Switzerland. Order your copy online. English version online here.

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Pain is not pointless. Deprived of the capacity to sense the red hot of metal, the cut of a sharp blade, or even the breaking of a bone, our bodies would be in very poor shape indeed. A child has to learn very fast what is too hot, and what can bruise. Without the perception of pain, there is little chance of survival. We need to learn to shun what could hurt us and rest when part of us needs to repair.

A little bit of praise!

“I recently stumbled upon your columns. Let me congratulate you on achieving the near impossible, for your articles have enabled me to successfully marry IT with the Life Sciences and better explain the concepts of bioinformatics to those who are not in the know of the field.

Your articles are very well written, lucid, and contain just enough information to excite the reader to want to learn more about the topic being discussed. They fall in a very rare category where they are accessible to everyone, from the undergraduate students to research students who want to have a basic idea of the topics being discussed. Some of your articles, like "Our hollow architecture" and "Throb" are outstanding pieces.

I would highly recommend your articles as a necessary reading in undergrad classes to get students inspired about the various avenues of research.”

— Rohan Chaubal, Senior Researcher in Genomics

Thank you to Vivienne Baillie Gerritsen & AI whose work we reproduce on our site!