https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7973-022X
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Alice Y. Cheung, Chao Li, Yan-jiao Zou, Hen-Ming Wu, Glycosylphosphatidylinositol Anchoring: Control through Modification, Plant Physiology, Volume 166, Issue 2, October 2014, Pages 748–750, https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.114.246926
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Since their discovery (Low and Saltiel, 1988), glycosylphosphatidylinositol-anchored proteins (GPI-APs) have provoked intense interest as crucial regulators for growth, morphogenesis, reproduction, and disease pathogenesis in organisms ranging from yeast and trypanosomes to animals and plants. The lipid moiety, the glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchor, is synthesized in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER); the protein component is cotranslationally inserted into the ER and posttranslationally modified by the addition of a GPI anchor (Kinoshita et al., 2013; Fig. 1). GPI-APs are then transported via the Golgi to the outer surface of the plasma membrane. The lipid anchor mediates stable attachment of these proteins to the cell surface, where some play important roles as signaling regulators from sphingolipid- and sterol-enriched membrane microdomains (Simons and Gerl, 2010). Some GPI-APs are released from the cell membrane by phosphatidylinositol-specific phospholipases to the extracellular matrix, where they might engage in processes such as cell adhesion and cell-cell communication. In Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), there are about 250 predicted GPI-APs (Borner et al., 2003), a relatively large number compared with about 150 in mammals and 50 in the budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). Important functions for plant GPI-APs have been elucidated through the study of individual proteins, such as the COBRA family in cell expansion and cell wall biosynthesis (Brady et al., 2007), ARABINOGALACTAN PROTEIN18 in megagametogenesis (Demesa-Arévalo and Vielle-Calzada, 2013), and LORELEI in the pollen tube-female gametophyte interaction (Capron et al., 2008; Tsukamoto et al., 2010; Duan et al., 2014). However, it is the studies of mutants defective in GPI biosynthesis that underscore the general importance of GPI-APs as a class: lacking the capacity to assemble the anchor is lethal.
