How tissues can take the heat.

Abstract

Stress Response Heat shock proteins (HSPs) show a generally conserved stress response, interacting with specific chaperone proteins to maintain cellular homeostasis. However, studies of the heat shock response (HSR) tend to be performed in unicellular organisms or tissue culture. To test whether the HSR is global or tissue-specific, Ma et al. examined HSR and specificity in muscle and intestine in Caenorhabditis elegans. They observed that the tissue specificity of the HSR was determined by the ratio of the specific proteome of each tissue relative to associated HSP chaperone proteins. On the basis of these findings, the authors suggest that some tissue-specific human disease may be explained by similar mechanisms. G3 10.1534/g3.116.038232 (2017).