Holding on to peroxisomes

Holding on to peroxisomes

Yeast cells are known to actively partition organelles between the mother and bud during division. Mitochondria, for example, are subjected to both retention and ordered movement to ensure that a proper fraction of the organelles end up in each cell after cytokinesis. In the case of peroxisomes, researchers knew that a subset of the organelles moved into the bud in a myosin-dependent manner, bu...

Holding services to account

BACKGROUND Recently, the frequency of audit inspections of health services for people with intellectual disability (ID) in the UK has increased, from occasional inquiries to a systematic audit of all services. From 2008, a process of continuous audit 'surveillance' of specialist health services is to be introduced. Similar regimes of inspection are in place for social care services. AIM To ex...

Holding the lid on HIV.

Hitchhiking fads en route to peroxisomes

A unique aspect of protein translocation across the peroxisomal membrane is that folded and oligomeric proteins get across this membrane (Purdue and Lazarow, 2001). The generality of this rule, its specific features, and its mechanism are not fully understood. A paper in this issue addresses, in a very thorough fashion, the assembly, cofactor binding, and import of an oligomeric protein, acyl-C...

A Conserved Tripeptide Sorts Proteins to Peroxisomes

The firefly luciferase protein contains a peroxisomal targeting signal at its extreme COOH terminus (Gould et al., 1987). Site-directed mutagenesis of the luciferase gene reveals that this peroxisomal targeting signal consists of the COOH-terminal three amino acids of the protein, serine-lysine-leucine. When this tripeptide is appended to the COOH terminus of a cytosolic protein (chloramphenico...