J Genomics 2015; 3:40-50. doi:10.7150/jgen.11015 This volume Cite
Review
1. Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, CO, 80045, USA
2. Orthopedics Department, Changhai Hospital Affiliated to Second Military Medical University, Shanghai, 200433, China
Eukaryotic genome encodes numerous WD40 repeat proteins, which generally function as platforms of protein-protein interactions and are involved in numerous biological process, such as signal transduction, gene transcriptional regulation, protein modifications, cytoskeleton assembly, vesicular trafficking, DNA damage and repair, cell death and cell cycle progression. Among these diverse functions, genome integrity maintenance and cell cycle progression are extremely important as deregulation of them is clinically linked to uncontrolled proliferative diseases such as cancer. Thus, we mainly summarize and discuss the recent understanding of WD40 proteins and their molecular mechanisms linked to genome stability and cell cycle progression in this review, thereby demonstrating their pervasiveness and importance in cellular networks.
Keywords: WD40 protein, DNA damage, cell death, cell cycle