Researchers at Harvard Medical School have discovered how immature cells grow up to be red blood cells.
Red blood cells are unique in that they make space for oxygen-carrying hemoglobin by purging the nucleus, mitochondria, ribosomes and other parts of the cell. For more than 20 years,
“The creation of highly specialized cells is very important for processes such as oxygen delivery to tissues, our ability to see and reproduce, and to make skin,” said Daniel Finley, professor of cell biology at Harvard. “Understanding exactly how this happens gives us better insight into some of the most fundamental properties of living things.”
Finley and his colleagues worked off of Finley’s hunch that the process of specialization was controlled by an enzyme called UBE2O, which marked cell parts for destruction with a protein called ubiquitin allowing the protesasome to recognize them as needing to be purged. Using a series of tests that relied on large-scale protein analyses not available in earlier decades, the researchers confirmed the enzyme’s role. Their results revealed that immature red blood cells lacking UBE2O retained hundreds of proteins and failed to become specialized.
Source & further reading:https://hms.harvard.edu/news/make-way-hemoglobin
Journal article:http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6350/eaan0218/tab-figures-data
Source: Corina Marinescu
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