Dead or Alive?

摘要

The enzymatic competence of proteins can be difficult to judge, and some apparent pseudoenzymes have fooled researchers. Take CASK, a protein found in neurons that is one of the original "nonfunctional" kinases pinpointed by Gerard Manning, director of bioinformatics and computational biology at Genentech in South San Francisco, California, and colleagues (see main story, p. 25). Kinases typically swipe a phosphate group from the molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and pass it to another protein. CASK lacks two key amino acids that researchers thought were necessary for transferring a phosphate, which suggested that it's a prototypical pseudokinase.