Issue 253 / December 2022
A Heated Legacy
Stress. We know what it feels like. Though we may be the only living organism to have turned it into a fertile and imaginative piece of conversation, every single living species on this planet is prone to stress and its effects. It comes in many forms - heat, cold, hunger, overwork, noise, pressure, weight, toxicity - and gives rise to an array of symptoms such as migraine, fatigue, weariness, depression, indigestion, eczema, insomnia, and this is only an anthropocentric list! Sloths, birds, grapes or butterflies may not be accustomed to work overload or headaches but they do suffer from heat, drought or deforestation for example, as do so many species on earth. To guarantee their survival and hence reproduction, organisms have developed mechanisms to challenge stress. Some plants for example, are equipped with sensors that detect heat shock thereby setting off pathways that will not only protect the plant but also compel it to flower faster under the strain. Some plants also seem to acquire the capacity to remember heat and react faster to it when it occurs again, or even to transmit this memory to their progeny. How? Thanks to the action of at least two proteins: HSFA2 and HTT5.
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Protein Spotlight (ISSN 1424-4721) is a monthly review written by the
Swiss-Prot team of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
Spotlight articles describe a specific protein or family of proteins on an informal tone. |