Inducing Sprouty degradation

Receptor tyrosine kinases are often regulated by negative feedback loops that limit their signaling duration. But cells then need to get out of that loop so that they can respond once again. One way to balance the scales is a “signal- dependent degradation of a negative regulator,” according to Dafna Bar-Sagi.

The inducible degradation of the protein hSpry2, a human homologue of the negative regulator Sprouty, is the subject of two recent articles. In the fly, Sprouty is an antagonist of fibroblast and epidermal growth factor (FGF and EGF) signaling, whereas the human version inhibits only FGF signaling. Now, Amy Hall, Natalia Jura, Bar-Sagi, and colleagues (State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY) and Chanan Rubin, Yosef Yarden, and colleagues (Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel) show that when EGF...