Endoplasmic-reticulum-associated Protein Degradation - Checkpoints

Checkpoints

As the variation of ERAD-substrates is enormous, several variations of the ERAD mechanism have been proposed. Indeed, it was confirmed that soluble, membrane and transmembrane proteins were recognized by different mechanisms. This led to the identification of 3 different pathways that constitute in fact 3 checkpoints.

• The first checkpoint is called ERAD-C and monitors the folding state of the cytosolic domains of membrane proteins. If defaults are detected in the cytosolic domains, this checkpoint will remove the misfolded protein.

• When the cytosolic domains are found to be correctly folded, the membrane protein will pass to a second checkpoint where the luminal domains are monitored. This second checkpoint is called the ERAD-L pathway. Not only membrane proteins surviving the first checkpoint are controlled for their luminal domains, also soluble proteins are inspected by this pathway as they are entirely luminal and thus bypass the first checkpoint. If a lesion in the luminal domains is detected, the involved protein is processed for ERAD using a set of factors including the vesicular trafficking machinery that transports misfolded proteins from the endoplasmic reticulum to the Golgi apparatus.

• Also a third checkpoint has been described that relies on the inspection of transmembrane domains of proteins. It is called the ERAD-M pathway but it is not very clear in which order it has to be placed with regard to the two previously described pathways.