Watching a puppet show can teach you something about how estrogen works in the body, according to Rice University scientists whose research could open the door to new strategies for regulating the hormone—which could help prevent breast cancer and other diseases.
Watching a puppet show can teach you something about how estrogen works in the body, according to Rice University scientists whose research could open the door to new strategies for regulating the hormone—which could help prevent breast cancer and other diseases.
Just as a puppeteer manipulates strings, an estrogen receptor , once it binds to a hormone molecule, manipulates its structure to access a specific DNA site, where it will either enhance or inhibit gene expression. Estrogen receptors play a crucial role in breast cancer, making them therapeutic targets for tumor growth inhibition.
A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explains the link between the particular structure of estrogen receptor alpha proteins and how these receptors function at the molecular level.
“This molecule has two regions or domains that normally are not touching each other,” said Rice theoretical physicist Peter Wolynes , the study’s corresponding author. “Instead, they’re separated by two stringlike structures. The puzzle was, how do these two domains communicate with each other? How is the information that a hormone is bound conveyed to the domain that binds DNA?”
Using software called AWSEM that his research group developed to predict the structure and dynamics of proteins, Wolynes and his team of Rice graduate students found estrogen receptor hormone regulation is controlled by a previously unknown strategy of molecular communication.
“For most of my career, the dominant viewpoint about how protein molecules function has been that they’re fairly rigid objects and that their molecular mechanics involved interactions like those in simple machines, using levers and hinges.
