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Cellular mechanisms leading to desminopathy: Segregation, aggregation and proteostasis imbalance of desmin mutants in muscle cells and tissue

Subject Area Cell Biology
Term from 2016 to 2020
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 320437777
 
Final Report Year 2021

Final Report Abstract

A major outcome of this study is the direct and strong binding of the unconventional intermediate filament protein syncoilin to desmin. Its orininal description was in muscle, where it was found to localize to desmin filaments at the sites of their association with costameres. In addition, the direct interaction with a second unconventional intermediate filament protein, nestin, was identified, which has also repeatedly reported to localize with IFs in the past, but now we have evidence that they already interact, within a small complexes, in situ. Notably, these interactions occur both in an artificial cell system, vimentin-knockout fibroblasts expressing desmin, as well as in myoblasts from knock-in mice. At present, we do not know if these interactions help to chaperone the folding of desmin into functional coiled coils and eventual mediate loading of unit-length-filaments to structural hubs for transport in further topological processing. This possibility has to be investigated within the next future. Furthermore, we have not observed major differences in the composition of the desmincomplexes between WT-desmin and mutant desmin expressing cells yet, although some of the factors captured uniquely need further investigation.

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