Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Identification Of Ecdysone Hormone Receptor Agonists As A Therapeutic Approach For Treating Filarial Infections, Amruta S Mhashilkar, Sai L Vankayala, Canhui Liu, Fiona Kearns, Priyanka Mehrotra, George Tzertzinis, Subba R Palli, H. Lee Woodcock Iii, Thomas R Unnasch

Chemistry Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: A homologue of the ecdysone receptor has previously been identified in human filarial parasites. As the ecdysone receptor is not found in vertebrates, it and the regulatory pathways it controls represent attractive potential chemotherapeutic targets.

METHODOLOGY/ PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Administration of 20-hydroxyecdysone to gerbils infected with B. malayi infective larvae disrupted their development to adult stage parasites. A stable mammalian cell line was created incorporating the B. malayi ecdysone receptor ligand-binding domain, its heterodimer partner and a secreted luciferase reporter in HEK293 cells. This was employed to screen a series of ecdysone agonist, identifying seven agonists active at sub-micromolar concentrations. …

Molecular Mechanism Of Protein Kinase Recognition And Sorting By The Hsp90 Kinome-Specific Cochaperone Cdc37, Dimitra Keramisanou, Adam Aboalroub, Ziming Zhang, Wenjun Liu, Devon Marshall, Andrea Diviney, Randy W. Larsen, Ralf Landgraf, Ioannis Gelis

Chemistry Faculty Publications

Despite the essential functions of Hsp90, little is known about the mechanism that controls substrate entry into its chaperone cycle. We show that the role of Cdc37 cochaperone reaches beyond that of an adaptor protein and find that it participates in the selective recruitment of only client kinases. Cdc37 recognizes kinase specificity determinants in both clients and nonclients and acts as a general kinase scanning factor. Kinase sorting within the client-to-nonclient continuum relies on the ability of Cdc37 to challenge the conformational stability of clients by locally unfolding them. This metastable conformational state has high affinity for Cdc37 and forms …