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Perspectives
The Double Life of the Ku Protein: Facing the DNA Breaks and the Extracellular Environment
Catherine Muller, Jenny Paupert, Sylvie Monferran and Bernard Salles
volume 4 | issue 3
march 2005Pages: 438 - 441
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The Ku heterodimer (Ku70/Ku80) plays a central role in DNA double strand break recognition and repair. It has been shown, more than ten years ago, that Ku is also expressed at the cell surface of different cells types along with its intra-cellular pool within the nucleus and the cytoplasm but involvement of Ku in cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix adhesion has been only recently demonstrated. In addition, we have shown that Ku may have a second and unexpected activity in cell/microenvironment interaction. Indeed, Ku appears to be involved in extra-cellular proteolytic processes through its specific interaction, on the cell surface, with the matrix metalloprotease 9. Taken together, these results suggest that Ku function at the cell surface is likely to be important in tumour invasion. Various fundamental questions arise from these observations. How Ku is expressed on the cell surface, why a protein with completely unrelated functions also serve as an « integrin like »molecule once expressed at the cell surface and is this functional moonlighting of Ku related to cell transformation remain open issues that will be discussed here.
We now provide open access to journal articles published online for one year or more. This article may be downloaded at the following link:
Download PDF If the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.