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Sumoylation of Human Translationally Controlled Tumor Protein Is Important for Its Nuclear Transport

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journal contribution
posted on 2012-08-20, 00:00 authored by Gnanasekar Munirathinam, Kalyanasundaram Ramaswamy
Translationally controlled tumor protein (TCTP) lacks nuclear bipartite localization signal sequence; yet TCTP is present abundantly in the nucleus. At present it is not known how TCTP gets transported to the nucleus. Sequence analyses showed that all TCTPs described to date have putative small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) motifs. Since SUMO modification plays an important role in the nuclear transport of proteins, we evaluated whether SUMO motifs are important for transport of TCTP into the nucleus. We show that TCTP exists in sumoylated form in cytoplasm and nucleus of mammalian cells. Point mutation of lysine residue in the SUMO motif compromised the ability of TCTP to get sumoylated in vitro. When cells were transfected with FLAG-tagged mutated TCTP, nuclear transport of TCTP was inhibited confirming that sumoylation is critical for the nuclear transport of TCTP. Our previous studies demonstrated that TCTP can function as an antioxidant protein in the nucleus.When we mutated TCTP at the SUMO motif the antioxidant function of TCTP was compromised. Results presented in this study thus show that sumoylation plays an important role in the transport of TCTP into the nucleus where they function as antioxidant protein.

Funding

This work was supported by Public Health Service Grants AI-64745 and AI-39066 from NIAID.

History

Publisher Statement

Copyright © 2012 G. Munirathinam and K. Ramaswamy. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1155/2012/831940

Publisher

Hindawi Publishing Corporation

Language

  • en_US

issn

2090-2247

Issue date

2012-01-01

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