Thanksgiving to Yeast, the HMGB Proteins History from Yeast to Cancer

Abstract

Yeasts have been a part of human life since ancient times in the fermentation of many natural products used for food. In addition, in the 20th century, they became powerful tools to elucidate the functions of eukaryotic cells as soon as the techniques of molecular biology developed. Our molecular understandings of metabolism, cellular transport, DNA repair, gene expression and regulation, and the cell division cycle have all been obtained through biochemistry and genetic analysis using different yeasts. In this review, we summarize the role that yeasts have had in biological discoveries, the use of yeasts as biological tools, as well as past and on-going research projects on HMGB proteins along the way from yeast to cancer.

Keywords: HMGB proteins; cancer; interactome; molecular methods; research hits; yeast.

Figure 1

Evolution of yeast publications in PUBMed. (a) Conventional and (b) less-conventional yeasts.

Figure 2

Yeast research in Nobel Prizes and their relation to cancer hallmarks. Symbols for cancer hallmarks are from [38].

Figure 3

Structure of the HMG-box domain based on Hmgb1 protein structure PDBID: 2gzk and alignments of HMGB proteins. The amino acid frequency for each position of the HMG-box domain is represented in Logo format based on the multiple alignment available in Supplementary File S1. Amino acid sidechains that intercalate between the DNA base steps to induce the DNA kinks are indicated in red.

Figure 4

Phylogenetic relations between the HMG-box domains of the yeast proteins Rox1 and Ixr1, and other human HMGB proteins. Phylogeny analysis was made following the Neighbor-joining method (excluding gaps). Output results are available in the Supplementary File S2.