A Cinderella story: how the vacuolar proteases Pep4 and Prb1 do more than cleaning up the cell’s mass degradation processes
Authors:Winnie Kerstens1,2 and Patrick Van Dijck1,2
doi: 10.15698/mic2018.10.650
Volume 5, pp. 438 to 443, published 18/09/2018.
1 VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology, Kasteelpark Arenberg 31, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium.
2 Laboratory of Molecular Cell Biology, Institute of Botany and Microbiology, KU Leuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 31, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium.
Keywords:
Pep4, Prb1, cathepsin D, protease, programmed cell death, SAGA, prion, Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Please cite this article as:
Winnie Kerstens and Patrick Van Dijck (2018). A Cinder-ella story: how the vacuolar proteases Pep4 and Prb1 do more than cleaning up the cell’s mass degradation processes. Microbial Cell 5(10): 438-443. doi: 10.15698/mic2018.10.650
© 2018 Kerstens and Van Dijck. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduc-tion in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.
Abstract:
Recently, several research groups have assigned non-vacuolar functions to the well-known Saccharomyces cerevisiae vacuolar proteases Pep4 and Prb1, which are also known as proteinases A and B. These non-vacuolar activities seem to be autophagy-independent and stress-induced and suggest an unexplored but possibly prominent role for the proteases outside the vacuole. The functions range from the involvement in programmed cell death, to protection from hazardous protein forms and regulation of gene expression. We propose that a deeper understanding of these molecular processes will provide new insights that will be important for both fungal biology as well as studies in mammalian cells, as they might open up perspectives in the search for novel drug targets. To illustrate this, we summarize the recent literature on non-vacuolar Pep4 and Prb1 functions in S. cerevisiae and review the current data on the protein homologs in pathogenic fungi.