Key Concepts

• Guardian proteins, found in all forms of life, keep a wide variety of cellular processes running smoothly.
• Through their diverse interactions, these proteins pick up telltale “fingerprints” of each cell’s contents, which has allowed them to evolve a critical role in immune responses to cancer or pathogens.
• Therapies that take advantage of these proteins include inhibitors and enhancers of their various natural functions.

In 1962 someone at the Genetics Institute in Pavia, Italy, turned up the temperature in an incubator holding fruit flies. When Ferruccio Ritossa, then a young geneticist, examined the cells of these “heat shocked” flies, he noticed that their chromosomes had puffed up at discrete locations. The puffy appearance was a known sign that genes were being activated in those regions to give rise to their encoded proteins, so those sites of activity became known as the heat shock loci.

The effect was reproducible but initially considered to be unique to the fruit fly. It took another 15 years before the proteins generated when these chromosome puffs appear were detected in mammals and other forms of life. In what is certainly among the most absorbing stories in contemporary biology, heat shock proteins (HSPs) have since been recognized as occupying a central role in all life—not just at the level of cells but of organisms and whole populations.

   
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