Therapeutic peptides targeting the Ras superfamily

The Ras superfamily at a glance.

The Ras superfamily of small guanosine triphosphatases (GTPases) comprise over 150 human members (Table S1 in supplementary material), with evolutionarily conserved orthologs found in Drosophila, C. elegans, S. cerevisiae, S. pombe, Dictyostelium and plants (Colicelli, 2004). The Ras oncogene proteins are the founding members of this family, which is divided into five major branches on the basi...

Signaling Interplay in Ras Superfamily Function

Ras proteins function as signaling hubs that are activated by convergent signaling pathways initiated by extracellular stimuli. Activated Ras in turn regulates a diversity of downstream cytoplasmic signaling cascades. Ras proteins are founding members of a large superfamily of small GTPases that have significant sequence and biochemical similarities. Recent observations have established a compl...

Therapeutic Targets of the TNF Superfamily

Biochemical Clustering of Monomeric GTPases of the Ras Superfamily*□S

To date phylogeny has been used to compare entire families of proteins based on their nucleotide or amino acid sequence. Here we developed a novel analytical platform allowing a systematic comparison of protein families based on their biochemical properties. This approach was validated on the Rho subfamily of GTPases. We used two high throughput methods, referred to as AlphaScreen and FlashPlat...

Emerging concepts in the Ras superfamily of GTP-binding proteins.

The Ras superfamily of GTP-binding proteins (> 50 members) regulates a diverse spectrum of intracellular processes. These include cellular proliferation and differentiation, intracellular vesicular trafficking, cytoskeletal control, NADPH oxidase function, as well as others. In this review, we describe recent progress and emerging themes in the action and regulation of these important cellular ...