Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.
Subscribe

Logo for

Science 337 (6090): 44-45

Copyright © 2012 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science

A Lipid Linchpin for Wnt-Fz Docking

Mariann Bienz1, and Xi He2

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the discovery of Wnt1 (1), the founding member of a family of conserved secreted factors that define signaling pathways with pivotal roles in animal development, tissue homeostasis, and numerous diseases, including cancer (2, 3). Much later, the transmembrane proteins of the Frizzled (Fz) family were identified as the Wnt receptors (4). Wnt proteins proved extremely challenging to purify as active proteins; they require a lipid modification for activity (5), rendering them hydrophobic and insoluble in the absence of detergent. The resulting lack of structural data has hampered mechanistic progress. The structure of the Wnt-Fz complex reported by Janda et al. on page 59 of this issue (6) provides important insights into how Wnt ligands interact with their receptors.

1 MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 0QH, UK.
2 The F. M. Kirby Neurobiology Center, Boston Children's Hospital, Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA.

E-mail: mb2{at}mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk (M.B.); xi.he{at}childrens.harvard.edu (X.H.)

To Advertise     Find Products

Science Signaling. ISSN 1937-9145 (online), 1945-0877 (print). Pre-2008: Science's STKE. ISSN 1525-8882