Garbage on, garbage off: new insights into plasma membrane protein quality control.

Maintenance of cellular protein quality – by restoring misfolded proteins to their native state and by targeting terminally misfolded or damaged proteins for degradation – is a critical function of all cells. To ensure protein quality, cells have evolved various organelle-specific quality control mechanisms responsible recognizing and responding to misfolded proteins at different subcellular locations of the cell. Recently, several publications have begun to elucidate mechanisms of quality control that operate at the plasma membrane (PM), recognizing misfolded PM proteins and targeting their endocytic trafficking and lysosomal degradation. Here, I discuss these recent developments in our understanding of PM quality control mechanisms and how they relate to global protein quality control strategies in the cell.

细胞蛋白质质量的维持——通过将错误折叠的蛋白质恢复到其天然状态以及将末端错误折叠或受损的蛋白质作为降解目标——是所有细胞的一项关键功能。为确保蛋白质质量，细胞已经进化出各种细胞器特异性的质量控制机制，这些机制负责识别细胞不同亚细胞位置的错误折叠蛋白质并作出反应。最近，一些出版物已经开始阐明在质膜（PM）起作用的质量控制机制，即识别错误折叠的质膜蛋白质并确定其胞吞转运和溶酶体降解的靶向。在此，我将讨论我们对质膜质量控制机制的理解方面的这些最新进展，以及它们如何与细胞中的整体蛋白质质量控制策略相关联。