The role of charge and polarity in over-activation of cancer cells through N-glycoslation.

What is it about?

Charge and polarity are important stereochemical features of membrane-bound cell proteins that are instrumental for their preferences for PTMs (e.g., glycosylation and phosphorylation). We analyzedthe charge- and polarity-based mechanistic involvement in neoplastic contexts. We mapped the genome-wide 1,117 proteins (2,909 asparagine residues) in our study, and predicted their charge and polarity preferences for N-Glycosylation.

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Why is it important?

We attempted to sketch a possible relationship between charge & polarity features based preferences for N-Glycosylation and phenotypes of neoplastic cells (A possible structure-function correlation). To my knowledge, this is the first study correlating the charge & polarity based amino acid features (e.g., amino acid side-chain environment) playing instrumental role in N-Glycosylation and induce constitutiveness of cancer cells (e.g., proliferation and epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition). https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fonc.2018.00029/full

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