NIH R01 · 2025
Protist Oxygen Sensing in Human Disease Protist Oxygen Sensing in Human Disease
Sensing and responding to changes in environmental oxygen is critical for aerobic organisms. Metazoans accomplish this by destabilizing a transcription factor called hypoxia inducible factor (HIF) in oxygen sufficiency. This is achieved by an oxygen-dependent prolyl 4-hydroxylase (PHD) that hydroxylates proline residues in the HIF-1α transcription factor that targets it for ubiquitin-dependent proteasomal degradation. Protozoans have PHDs but lack HIF and thus respond to changes in oxygen differently and we use the evolutionary distant protists Dictyostelium and Toxoplasma to address this question. Initial studies in Dictyostelium revealed that its PHD, DdPHYa, modifies a proline in Skp1,…
From the public funding record at NIH RePORTER. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.