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The Molecular Genetics research group at the University of Murcia recently published a review of their research in the prestigious Annual Review of Biochemistry at the invitation of Robert D. Kornberg, Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 and editor of that medium.
This study focuses on his most relevant work: the discovery of a new type of photoreceptor protein that uses vitamin B12 as a light-sensing molecule.
Through this research, the team found a new role for this vitamin unknown to date.
This review includes a route from the first signs of the discovery, named by the principal investigator of the Montserrat group Elías Arnanz as an Eureka moment, to the experimental demonstration and the publication in Nature, to be able to show the photography of the protein in operation at any moment .
Elías explains that this article supposes for them an important recognition of the international community to the findings realized during the last years.
"We are still trying to understand in more detail how it works and to observe if the application is possible", comments the professor in Genetics.
The UMU research team works to understand how we respond to the stimuli to which we are exposed using a bacterial model, through which we can extrapolate important results.
The review article focuses on CarH protein of the bacterium, which together with other proteins found by the group, called Car, control the production of carotenes, reddish pigments found also in tomatoes or carrots and that bacteria Produces to protect against damage from light.
The group also investigates the other Car proteins, some of which are more typical of higher organisms.
"We humans have a protein similar to a Car protein, which we do not know how it works, so we are using our bacteria to understand its function and from there to understand the functioning in higher organisms."
After the finding on CarH carried out in the University of Murcia, during the review they have verified that this protein is very extended in other bacteria, in which its function is unknown.
Currently, the team of Elijah does an evolutionary work to understand how this type of protein has emerged as well as how it works in other bacteria, finding very interesting variants.
This discovery served to publish in the prestigious journal of impact PNAS in 2011, and later in 2015 in the recognized Nature, in collaboration with a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, and Nature Communications, explaining the operation of this protein.
The Annual Reviews, as the name implies, are magazines that are published annually with review articles made at the invitation of well-known researchers to the most internationally recognized teams on certain leading topics.
The first magazine in the Annual Reviews collection was the Annual Review of Biochemistry, founded in 1932 by Professor J. Murray Luck of Stanford University, given the impossibility of covering all existing scientific literature on a given subject.
Thus, it was decided that each year a critical review on the state of various issues was carried out, guiding the path to future research and guiding the issues to be resolved.
This year Volume 86 is published, with such relevant subjects as autophagy, recently recognized with a Nobel Prize or the development of new antibiotics.
Other international groups are using the findings obtained to develop new lines of research among which is to find applications to this protein in a novel field known as Optogenetics.
One of its uses may be to control the transmission of signals through light, as has been shown recently in zebrafish and in human cells.
These advances may have an application in fields of research as relevant as cancer.
Other light sensing proteins are already being used as a new strategy in Neurobiology to precisely control the activation of certain neurons and understand how they work.
Source: Universidad de Murcia
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