Pursuing the Therapeutic Potential of the SUMOylation System by Characterizing the Mechanisms That Regulate SUMO Levels in the Cell

ABSTRACT

The SUMOylation system, a type of protein regulatory system present in all cells, is rapidly increased upon exposure to different types of stress, including influenza virus infection. For influenza, if the increase is large enough, the virus cant multiply and infection is blocked. The goal of this study is to determine whether a process known as alternative splicing, which produces small but meaningful changes in the templates used to make proteins, plays a central role in regulating the activity of the SUMOylation system. To explore this possibility, we proposed to measure the abundance of the different templates that code for the SUMO proteins (the central players in the SUMOylation system) under different types of stress conditions. We also proposed to study how changing the proportion of those templates affects the ability of the SUMOylation system to respond to stress and characterize the activity of new forms of the SUMO proteins that up to now had remained unknown. Although the activities proposed for the first year of this grant were greatly affected by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we made some progress on the development of some of the constructs proposed for achieving some of the experimental goals.