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Despite the extensive ongoing research, there still exist plenty of diseases whose mechanisms have not yet been fully understood, one such example being proteasome-related disorders. Over the last few years, an increasing number of studies have been initiated
to elucidate their driving pathophysiological mechanisms. Determining the systematic effects of genomic alterations occurring in genes encoding 19S proteasome subunits is a key to comprehend the molecular basis of syndromic intellectual disability (ID) pathogenesis and
the subsequent design of new targeted therapies. Therefore, the main objective of my research was to contribute to the identification of potential drivers of syndromic ID, and thereby pave the way for the development of new targeted therapy approaches. In this regard, my aim was to characterize tissue, proteomic and metabolomic changes in cells from patients with PSMC5 mutations and uncover a potential dysregulation of various biochemical and/or inflammatory pathways.
To this end, I undertook a comparative examination of control and patient T cells expanded from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs). First, I assessed the proteasome composition in these samples (both in its denaturized and native form), by means of
SDS-PAGE, native PAGE and western-blotting. Moreover, I determined proteasome chymotrypsin-like activity by measure of Suc-LLVY-AMC peptidase activity assay. In addition, I analysed the activation status of the ER stress and mTOR pathway by RT-PCR and SDS-PAGE /western-blotting prior to a subsequent analysis of T-cell markers.
The data show that the investigated p.(Pro320Arg) and p.(Arg201Trp) de novo heterozygous missense mutations in the PSMC5 gene do not cause haploinsufficiency as the steady-state expression level of the PSMC5/Rpt6 full-length protein does not vary between control and patient cells. Further analysis of control and patient T cells under non-reducing conditions revealed that PSMC5/Rpt6 mutants were less efficiently incorporated into 26S proteasome complexes than their wild-type counterparts. The failure to assemble PSMC5/Rpt6 into fully mature proteasomes was associated with a reduced proteasome chymotrypsin-like activity in patient T cells, as determined by in-plate assays. These data unambiguously demonstrate that both of the p.(Pro320Arg) and p.(Arg201Trp) PSMC5 mutations identified in patients suffering from syndromic ID are loss-of-function mutations. Interestingly, my data further show that proteasome dysfunction in these patients was accompanied by abnormalities in mTOR signalling and T-cell differentiation, as determined by western-blotting and flow cytometry, respectively.
Altogether, our data identified for the first time PSMC5 as a disease-causing gene for
a syndromic form of ID. How proteasome dysfunction caused by PSMC5 variants contributes to disease pathogenesis, remains to be fully determined.