[Identification of the protein partners of the human nucleolar protein SURF6 in HeLa cells by GST pull-down assay]

The eukaryotic proteins comprising the SURF6 protein family are evolutionary conservative and housekeeping proteins however, functional roles of human SURF6 have not been studied so far. To shed light to this question in the present work we applied GST pull-down assay and used two proteins fused with GST, namely human GST-SURF6 and the conservative C-terminal domain of mouse Surf6 that has 85% homology with the C-terminus of the human SURF6 conservative domain (GST-Surf6-dom), to identify SURF6-interacting proteins in human HeLa cells. The results obtained showed that GST-SURF6 interacts with several key nucleolar RNA processing factors (B23/nucleophosmin, nucleolin, EBP2), and also with the specific cofactor of RNA polymerase I, protein UBE These results are the first experimental evidences in favor of participation of the human SURF6 protein in ribosome biogenesis, including transcription of rDNA and processing of rRNAs. The same results were obtained, when GST-Surf6-dom was used to pull-down proteins in HeLa cells. In addition, the panel of the GST-Surf6-dom protein partners, which were identified by mass-spectrometry, points to putative interactions of human SURF6 with a number of nuclear and nucleolar, proteins of other functional groups, i.e. to the protein plurifunctionality.