dictyNews Volume 21 Number 10

Published in

· 10 months ago

Dicty News 
Electronic Edition 
Volume 21, number 10 
October 3, 2003 

Please submit abstracts of your papers as soon as they have been  
accepted for publication by sending them to dicty@northwestern.edu. 

Back issues of Dicty-News, the Dicty Reference database and other  
useful information is available at dictyBase - http://dictybase.org. 

 
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  Abstracts 
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Cell-death alternative model organisms: why and which? 

Golstein P, Aubry L, Levraud JP. 

Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy, CNRS-INSERM-l'Universite de  
la Mediteranee, Parc Scientifique de Luminy, Case 906, 13288  
Marseille cedex 9, France. 

Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol. 2003 in press  

Classical model organisms have helped greatly in our understanding of  
cell death but, at the same time, might have constrained it.  
The use of other, non-classical model organisms from all biological  
kingdoms could reveal undetected molecular pathways and better-defined  
morphological types of cell death. Here we discuss what is known  
and what might be learned from these alternative model systems. 

 
Submitted by: Pierre Golstein [golstein@ciml.univ-mrs.fr] 

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The cyclase associated protein CAP as regulator of cell polarity and cAMP 
signaling in Dictyostelium 

 
Angelika A. Noegel, Rosemarie Blau-Wasser, Hameeda Sultana, Rolf Müller, 
Lars Israel, Michael Schleicher, Hitesh Patel, Cornelis J. Weijer 

 
accepted: Mol. Biol. Cell 

 
CAP (cyclase associated protein) is an evolutionarily conserved regulator 
of the G-actin/F-actin ratio and, in yeast, is involved in regulating the 
adenylyl cyclase activity. We show that cell polarization, F-actin  
organization and phototaxis are altered in a Dictyostelium CAP knockout 
mutant. Furthermore, in complementation assays we determined the roles of 
the individual domains in signaling and regulation of the actin 
cytoskeleton. We studied in detail the adenylyl cyclase activity and found 
that the mutant cells have normal levels of the aggregation phase specific 
adenylyl cyclase (ACA) and that receptor mediated activation is intact. 
However, cAMP relay which is responsible for the generation of propagating 
cAMP waves that control the chemotactic aggregation of starving 
Dictyostelium cells was altered, and the cAMP induced cGMP production was 
significantly reduced. The data suggest an interaction of CAP with adenylyl 
cyclase in Dictyostelium and an influence on signaling pathways directly as 
well as through its function as a regulatory component of the cytoskeleton.  

 
Submitted by: Michael Schleicher [schleicher@lrz.uni-muenchen.de] 

 

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[End Dicty News, volume 21, number 10]