Issue 260 / July 2023
Clearing The Clamour
There is an invisible and silent law that causes clutter to emerge and grow unless action is taken to deal with it. Who has not stood in the middle of a littered room and thought "Right, this needs clearing.". And for some reason, clearing clutter has this wonderful ability of also rinsing your mind. The same goes for cells. It begins at the molecular level and is called cell homeostasis, which is at the heart of any organism's health. Intracellular bodies (organelles) known as lysosomes have a major role in animal cell homeostasis, as they degrade components that are toxic to the cell, or foreign, or simply - like foodstuffs gone well beyond their sell-by dates - too old to be of any more use. When infected by bacteria, for instance, our body organises a swift initial response by calling up specialised cells known as macrophages whose role is to engulf and destroy invading pathogens. Macrophages perform this by way of their numerous lysosomes - but more importantly thanks to a protein known as TFEB that, upon infection, is activated to stimulate lysosome biosynthesis.
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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. |