engleski

NME/NM23/NDPK from unicellular eukaryotes to humans

Nucleoside-diphosphate kinases (NME/Nm23/NDPK) are a family of evolutionary conserved enzymes present in all domains of life. The NDPKs transfer the terminal phosphate from a nucleoside triphosphate (mainly ATP) to all other NDPs. A huge interest for this enzyme started when it was discovered that a gene named nm23-H1 (non-metastatic clone 23, also known as NME1), responsible for suppression of metastasis in murine melanoma, is encoding one of the subunits of NDPK, NDPK A. The NME/Nm23/NDPK family members have been assigned a vast range of biological functions including metastasis suppression although the exact mechanism by which they execute their biological functions still remains to be unraveled. Numerous studies reported that proteins from evolutionary distinct organisms exhibit extraordinary similarity in their structures with their orthologs in mammals. Therefore, it is presumed that they have similar biochemical and biological functions which can, in consequence, serve as a new approach of studying human diseases. We performed a series of biochemical and biological tests which suggest that some of the NME genes/proteins in human are represented by a single ancestral type gene that already possesses many of the functions described in mammals. On the contrary, the NME genes that branched of very early in the evolutionary history seem to have changed significantly during metazoan evolution, and along did their protein function.

Nm23 ; NME ; NDPK ; metastasis supressors

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