Deconvoluting protein lipidation using chemical proteomics

Congratulations to PhD students Ana Losada de La Lastra and Sarah Hassan for their recent review article in Current Opinion in Chemical Biology

Third year Cancer Research UK PhD student Ana and second year President's Scholar and ICB CDT student Sarah reviewed the biology and druggability of the three most common types of lipid post-translational modifications, focusing on the use of mass spectrometry methods to understand their roles in key biological processes.  

Lipids are commonly added to proteins post-translationally and this process plays an important role in many biological pathways. Conversely, the dysregulation of these modifications is often associated with diseases including cancer and inflammation.

The review covers new developments in the study of the three main lipid post-translational modifications - N-myristoylation, S-acylation, and S-prenylation, specifically focusing on the use of chemical proteomic techniques, and concludes with a discussion of the challenges still to be faced in this highly investigated field.

The authors would like to acknowledge support from Imperial College London through a President's Scholarship to Sarah Hassan, Cancer Research UK for a Program Foundation Award and the Convergence Science Centre for a studentship award to Ana Losada de la Lastra.