The phosphorylation of the heat shock factor as a modulator for the heat shock response

  • Authors:

  • Eugen Czeizler;Vladimir Rogojin;Ion Petre

  • Affiliations:

  • Aalto University, Espoo, Finland;Helsinki University, Helsinki, Finland;Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

The heat shock response is a well conserved defence mechanism against the accumulation of misfolded proteins due to prolonged elevated heat. The cell responds to heat shock by raising the levels of heat shock proteins (hsp), which are responsible for chaperoning protein refolding. The synthesis of hsp is highly regulated at the transcription level by specific heat shock (transcription) factors (hsf). One of the regulation mechanisms is the phosphorylation of hsf's. Experimental evidence shows a connection between the hyper-phosphorylation of hsf's and the transactivation of the hsp-encoding genes. In this paper we incorporate several (de)phosphorylation pathways into an existing well validated computational model of the heat shock response. We analyze the quantitative control of each of these pathways over the entire process. For each of these pathways we create detailed computational models which we subject to parameter estimation in order to fit them to existing experimental data. In particular, we find conclusive evidence supporting only one of the analyzed pathways. Also, we corroborate our results with a sequent set of computational models, of a more reduced size.