Researchers may have found a unique mechanism in the RNA of fruit flies that could control why cancer cells grow and how we age!
The researchers, led by UC Merced Department of Molecular and Cell Biology Professor Fred Wolf, discovered a mechanism that cells use to tune how much protein they make through the process of translating RNA into protein.
“This mechanism may be responsible for changes in protein translation in stress, cancer, and aging,” Wolf said.
Wolf and his fellow researchers use fruit flies, a popular choice among researchers because they are inexpensive to work with, reproduce quickly and abundantly, and it is easy to alter their genetics to test ideas. Research centered on the fruit fly has led to many sophisticated tools, Wolf said.
The research specifically looked at the function of a particular protein known as “OTUD6.”
At first, the team of researchers had no idea what they were looking for. When they first made flies that were mutant for OTUD6, they expected to see something obvious, such as the shape or number of wings or reproductive abnormalities. Instead, the flies appeared normal.
“We stressed the flies in as many ways as we could conceive of and found they were susceptible to chemical stress, for example, oxidative stress,” Wolf said. “This allowed us to search for how OTUD6 contributed to resilience to stress.”
The researchers looked for all proteins interacting with OTUD6 to discover what it does and found it reduced the ribosomes’ protein production by half. The modification lets cells produce more protein.
“We were quite surprised by the huge impact OTUD6 had on how much protein was made in cells: Making flies mutant for OTUD6 cut protein production in half. That’s a big difference,” Wolf said. “The amount of protein produced in cells is known to affect how long animals live, with less protein being made correlating with longer lifespan. Our OTUD6 mutants lived twice as long. We think this is because there is less protein being made.”
The amount of protein generated can also have a huge impact on some types of cancers.
Some types of OTUD6 in humans are found in increased levels in many cancers, and many cancers have increased protein production. The researchers stressed that they have no direct evidence for a link, but increased OTUD6 might contribute to cancer cell growth and proliferation.
Cells can change the amount of OTUD6 they produce, which in turn can regulate how much protein is made.
“It has been known for years that there are two other ways for cells to actively tune how much protein is made, and we think we discovered a third way,” Wolf said.
The team is interested in finding out how the cell changes the amount of OTUD6 present in cells, which could help understand how this new pathway is initiated and could lead to new ways of manipulating protein production to positively affect lifespan and possibly even cancer outcomes.
You can read the complete paper, which was published in Nature Communications, by clicking on this link.