{"id":25020,"date":"2013-08-11T12:46:19","date_gmt":"2013-08-11T10:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/?p=25020"},"modified":"2024-03-26T00:29:40","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T23:29:40","slug":"ps-its-not-cholesterol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/science\/ps-its-not-cholesterol\/","title":{"rendered":"PS: It\u2019s not cholesterol"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div\n  class=\"vf-box vf-box--inlay\">\n\n  <h3 class=\"vf-box__heading\">In a nutshell:<\/h3>\n  <p class=\"vf-box__text\">&#8211; Group of proteins don\u2019t carry cholesterol after all<br \/>&#8211; Requires re-thinking diseases the proteins have been linked to<br \/>&#8211; New method for taking proteins from the cell with their lipid cargo still attached<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>How our body processes cholesterol has a well-known impact on our health, but it turns out that another \u2018fat molecule\u2019 \u2013 or lipid \u2013 may be at the heart of some diseases which were thought to involve cholesterol. A group of proteins linked to conditions such as metabolic syndrome and some cancers don\u2019t carry cholesterol as was supposed, scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, have discovered in work published today in&nbsp;<em>Nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cOur findings mean the disease doesn\u2019t involve cholesterol, but another lipid: phosphatidylserine,\u201d says Anne-Claude Gavin, who led the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Until now, scientists thought the proteins Osh6 &amp; Osh7 carried sterols \u2013 cholesterol and other similar lipids \u2013 around the cell, because those proteins are very similar to ones that are known to do so. But Kenji Maeda from\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/embl.org\/groups\/gavin\/\">Gavin\u2019s lab<\/a>\u00a0found that they carry phosphatidylserine (PS) instead. They ferry PS from where it is produced inside the cell to where it is needed at the cell membrane \u2013 an important task, since if PS ends up in the wrong place on a mammalian cell membrane, it can cause coagulation and programmed cell death.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI expected some surprises, but nothing as big as this,\u201d says Maeda: \u201cI thought maybe we\u2019d find a protein carried a slightly different lipid, but PS and sterol? There\u2019s almost no similarity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The findings were doubly surprising, as scientists thought PS wasn\u2019t transported by proteins, but by vesicles. Gavin, Maeda and colleagues first made their surprising discovery when examining all the lipid-transporting proteins in yeast cells, as a test of a new approach they developed to fish proteins out of a cell with any lipids they carry still attached.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When the EMBL scientists looked at the equivalent human protein, they found that it also binds to PS rather than to cholesterol. The result opens up new paths for investigating the causes of a variety of diseases that this and other similar proteins have been linked to. It has also spiked the researchers\u2019 curiosity. Gavin and colleagues are now planning to expand from the half-dozen proteins that carry lipids in yeast cells to a similar study of their hundreds of counterparts in human cells. \u201cI think we may have interesting surprises,\u201d Gavin says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This work was carried out in collaboration with Marko Kaksonen\u2019s lab at EMBL.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How our body processes cholesterol has a well-known impact on our health, but it turns out that another \u2018fat molecule\u2019 \u2013 or lipid \u2013 may be at the heart of some diseases which were thought to involve cholesterol. A group of proteins linked to conditions such as metabolic syndrome and some&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,17591],"tags":[1786,1788],"embl_taxonomy":[],"class_list":["post-25020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-science-technology","tag-cholesterol","tag-lipid"],"acf":{"show_featured_image":false,"vf_locked":false,"featured":false,"article_intro":"<p>Disease-related proteins carry surprising cargo<\/p>\n","article_sources":[{"source_description":"<p>Maeda, K. Anand, K., Chiapparino, A., Kumar, A., Poletto, M., Kaksonen, M. &#038; Gavin, A.C. Interactome map uncovers phosphatidylserine transport by oxysterol-binding proteins. Published online in <em>Nature<\/em> on 11 August 2013. DOI: 10.1038\/nature12430. <\/p>\n","source_link_url":"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1038\/nature12430"}],"related_links":false,"in_this_article":false,"color":"#007B53","youtube_url":"","mp4_url":"","video_caption":"","press_contact":"EMBL Generic","field_target_display":"embl","source_article":false},"embl_taxonomy_terms":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>PS: It\u2019s not cholesterol | EMBL<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/science\/ps-its-not-cholesterol\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"PS: It\u2019s not cholesterol | EMBL\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How our body processes cholesterol has a well-known impact on our health, but it turns out that another \u2018fat molecule\u2019 \u2013 or lipid \u2013 may be at the heart of some diseases which were thought to involve cholesterol. 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