New publicaton: Ohgata, the Drosophila member of Cereblon protein family, regulates organismic growth

Prof. Dr. Michael Hoch mit Satoru Wakabayashi. © Foto: S. Hoch/Uni Bonn

Cereblon (CRBN) is a highly conserved protein across the animal and plant kingdoms. Human CRBN has gained prominence as the primary target of thalidomide, a sedative with severe side effects that caused a worldwide catastrophe about half a century ago. Physiological functions of CRBN family members, however, remain still elusive.

Mr. Satoru Wakabayashi (A Ph.D. student of the group of Prof. Toru Asahi and Prof. Naoya Sawamura of Waseda University, Japan), Prof. Hoch and their colleagues collaboratively identified the single Drosophila member of the CRBN family as a novel regulator of organismic growth. The group generated a fly line with a mutation within the gene encoding the CRBN family member by using the novel genome engineering technique called CRISPR-Cas9 system. They subsequently identified that the mutation leads to increase of body and organ size without affecting the body proportions. From the observed phenotype, the protein was named "Ohgata", meaning "large" in Japanese. The group further showed that the mutation is associated with elevated insulin signaling, an evolutionary conserved signal pathway that plays a critical function in growth, metabolism, fertility and aging. These findings altogether indicate that Ohgata regulates insulin signaling dependent-growth in Drosophila. Detailed molecular mechanisms of how Ohgata regulates growth are yet to be determined.

These findings are published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry.

This study was funded by following grants to MH: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 645 and SFB/TRR83), the Helmholtz cross program topic "Metabolic Dysfunction" and the Excellence Cluster ImmunoSensation.

Publication: Ohgata, the Single Drosophila Ortholog of Human Cereblon, Regulates Insulin Signaling-Dependent Organismic Growth. Wakabayashi S, Sawamura N, Voelzmann A, Broemer M, Asahi T and Hoch M. J. Biol. Chem. 2016 Oct. 4. doi: 10.1074/jbc.M116.757823. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 27702999.

URL: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27702999

Prof. Dr. Michael Hoch
LIMES-Institut
Universität Bonn
Tel. 02 28 / 73 - 6 27 36
m.hoch@uni-bonn.de

Prof. Dr. Toru Asahi
Faculty of Science and Engineering
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
+81-3-5369-7327
tasahi@waseda.jp

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Naoya Sawamura
Faculty of Science and Engineering
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
+81-3-5369-7327
naoya.sawamura@gmail.com

Satoru Wakabayashi
Faculty of Science and Engineering
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
+81-3-5369-7327
s.wakabayashi@asahi-lab.jp