Neurodegenerative disease: Hunting out the NUB1 of the matter.

摘要

Huntingtons disease is caused by an expanded polyglutamine-encoding repeat in the gene huntingtin (HTT) that leads to the accumulation of the mutant HTT protein (mHTT). With the aim of devising therapeutic strategies to reduce the levels of mHTT, Palacino and colleagues carried out a genome-wide screen to identify modifiers of mHTT abundance. In Nature Neuroscience, they describe how negative regulator of ubiquitin-like protein 1 (NUB1) enhances the proteasomal degradation of mHTT and that interferon-beta can be used to induce NUB1 expression and thus ameliorate the toxic effects of mHTT.