A few weeks ago, when I posted about the identification of a new E1 enzyme,1 suicyte drew my attention to another paper on the same enzyme, in J Biol Chem, from Groettrup’s group. At the time that paper was online but not officially published; as of now it’s officially out.2Just as a couple of notes:3
- suicyte implied that the Groettrup group beat Jin et al to publication — in fact the Jin et al paper was accepted first (Received 27 February 2007; Accepted 1 May 2007; Pelzer et al was Received June 4, 2007, accepted June 18, 2007).
- Suicyte also commented that “what I like about the JBC paper is that they keep the original name UBE1L2 for the gene instead of inventing a new one”. The author of the Nature paper (where they call it Uba6) explained to me that they had already talked about the gene at conferences before the name “UBE1L2″ was assigned, and so they decided to keep the name they had already talked about and (I believe) published in conference proceedings. The whole priority thing gets kind of messy under these circumstances.
- Dual E1 activation systems for ubiquitin differentially regulate E2 enzyme charging. Jianping Jin, Xue Li, Steven P. Gygi & J. Wade Harper. Nature 447, 1135-1138 (28 June 2007) [↩]
- UBE1L2, a Novel E1 Enzyme Specific for Ubiquitin. Christiane Pelzer, Ingrid Kassner, Konstantin Matentzoglu, Rajesh K. Singh, Hans-Peter Wollscheid, Martin Scheffner, Gunter Schmidtke, and Marcus Groettrup. J. Biol. Chem., Vol. 282, Issue 32, 23010-23014, August 10, 2007[↩]
- Minor points, perhaps, but since they’re already on the blog it’s worth clarification[↩]
Ian, thanks for the clarification. I had no idea that JBC can be THAT fast. 14 days from submission to final acceptance – pretty impressive. Maybe it is connected to the fact that ASBMB selected this work as ‘paper of the week’, see http://www.asbmb.org/ASBMB/site.nsf/web/6674755166C6746E8525732C005E8281
I should add that I have no connection whatsoever with the Groettrup group. I see Marcus occasionally at ubiquitin meetings, but that’s it. And I certainly agree with your previous analysis that the Nature paper offers far more than the JBC paper, explaining the difference in impact.
With regard to gene nomenclature: it is well possible that Wade mentioned this gene before Sept-06 (I found the name UBE1L2 in a file of that date on my hard disk). But before that, the gene was called MOP-4 for ‘monocyte expressed protein 4′, and this name dates back to 1998 (cf the uniprot entry Q86T78). Not that any of this is important…
-Kay
I’m inclined to be pretty forgiving about nomenclature. We ourselves renamed a gene that already had not one, not two, not three, but (at least) four names in the literature already. While I still think our name is the best (and, I modestly note, it seems to be by far the most popular in the literature as well) there are some, rare, occasions, late at night, when I feel a twinge of guilt for it.
Was this ARTS-1, eh, ERAP1? Does it really play a role in TNFR shedding? It seems this activity depends on the name given to the protein.
Yeah, ERAP1. I haven’t tested the TNF-R shedding aspect myself. For various reasons (that I won’t go into here) I’m moderately skeptical.