Issue 254 / January 2023
On A Tightrope
Too much of anything is never good. Excess alcohol, and our faculties are impaired. Excess heat, and drought spreads. Excess cold, and vineyards die. Too much, too, of what is paradoxically essential to life frequently turns out to be toxic. Consider oxygen, iron, zinc or vitamins to name but four. Though we may be acquainted with the symptoms of what 'too much' entails, these are merely the superficial echo of cells under stress. Over the aeons, and throughout the living kingdom, organisms have had to deal with periodical over-abundances of many things. While selecting systems to use them in small doses, they promoted others to keep them in check. As an illustration, iron is vital for ferrying oxygen in organisms, and it is crucial in DNA synthesis, DNA repair and other fundamental cellular processes. Yet, too much iron will kill a cell - a process known as ferroptosis. Though this may be an ideal way of ridding a tissue of unhealthy cells, alternative processes have also evolved to stabilise things and prevent ferroptosis. One of these processes involves a protein known as ferroptosis suppressor protein 1, or FSP1.
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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. |