Biomedical subjects

Desiree Tillo

Publications and source records attributed to Desiree Tillo.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2025

Plasma membrane accessible cholesterol is regulated by ACC1 and lipid droplets.

Proper maintenance of plasma membrane (PM) cholesterol is essential for diverse processes ranging from animal development to pathogen evasion. Despite decades of study, the mechanisms governing cellular cholesterol regulation are incomplete. Using genome-wide screens we find that ACC1, the rate-limiting enzyme in fatty acid biosynthesis, regulates PM cholesterol transport. ACC1 loss causes a ~10-fold increase in PM accessible cholesterol in cells and mice. Mechanistically, we find that ACC1 regulates lipid droplet (LD) catabolism, and LDs are intimately tied to PM accessible cholesterol levels since reductions or elevations in their numbers block or promote cholesterol trafficking, respectively. Furthermore, LDs are required for cholesterol trafficking induced by 25-hydroxycholesterol, a modulator of inflammation and an interferon-stimulated second messenger that protects cells from pathogen invasion. This work identifies an unrecognized role for ACC1 and LDs in cholesterol regulation, which has implications for diseases where LD numbers are altered, from metabolic syndromes to neurodegeneration.

25-hydroxycholesterol↗

PubMed2006

Codep: maximizing co-evolutionary interdependencies to discover interacting proteins.

Approaches for the determination of interacting partners from different protein families (such as ligands and their receptors) have made use of the property that interacting proteins follow similar patterns and relative rates of evolution. Interacting protein partners can then be predicted from the similarity of their phylogenetic trees or evolutionary distances matrices. We present a novel method called Codep, for the determination of interacting protein partners by maximizing co-evolutionary signals. The order of sequences in the multiple sequence alignments from two protein families is determined in such a manner as to maximize the similarity of substitution patterns at amino acid sites in the two alignments and, thus, phylogenetic congruency. This is achieved by maximizing the total number of interdependencies of amino acids sites between the alignments. Once ordered, the corresponding sequences in the two alignments indicate the predicted interacting partners. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach with computer simulations and in analyses of several protein families. A program implementing our method, Codep, is freely available to academic users from our website: http://www.uhnresearch.ca/labs/tillier/.

Computer Simulation↗