Anthony P. Nicholas – författare

Deimination is a relatively new post-translational modification of proteins, whose recognition is ever-increasing. First linked to the pathology of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), deimination is a process by which selected positively charged arginine amino acids are converted to neutral citrulline amino acids by the peptidyl arginine deiminase (PAD) family of enzymes.

Although the medical literature is rich with articles about the possible significance of deiminated proteins in RA, Protein Deimination in Human Health and Disease is the first publication to compile this knowledge and the growing amount of new information now known about the presence of deiminated proteins in the eye, skin, hair, gums, lung and nervous system, as well. As a result, this process has now been linked to numerous additional conditions besides RA, including cancer, glaucoma, Alzheimer''s disease, Parkinson''s disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord and peripheral nerve injury, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, among many others.

Chronicling the earliest studies of deimination up to the present, this volume distills what is currently known about citrullination of proteins in the human body and is the first book of its kind on the topic.

Published in 2014, Protein Deimination in Human Health and Disease was the first book on this novel post-translational modification, in which selected positively-charged arginine amino acids are converted to neutral citrulline amino acids by the peptidyl-arginine deiminase (PAD) family of enzymes. This area of research continues to expand rapidly, necessitating the need for this second edition. Chronicling the latest inflammatory, epigenetic, neurodegenerative, and carcinogenic processes, Protein Deimination in Human Health and Disease, Second Edition, updates the latest advances in deimination research, including new information on PAD enzyme structure and activity, and how PAD knock-out animals are being used to study known and newly-discovered links to various human diseases.

The first edition outlined what was known about citrullinated proteins in normal tissues such as skin and hair, as well as in maladies such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), multiple sclerosis (MS), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), glaucoma, peripheral nerve injury, neonatal hypoxic brain damage, and breast cancer. This second edition addresses numerous additional disorders such as diabetes, asthma, traumatic brain injury, inflammatory bowel disease, lupus, bone disease, heart failure, fronto-temporal dementia, and prostate and colon cancer. It also provides updates on the deimination research covering the three seminal diseases first linked to this process (RA, MS and AD), and details how auto-antibodies against citrullinated proteins contribute to disease. In addition, new hypotheses on the possible pathologic mechanisms of citrullinated myelin basic protein and glial fibrillary acidic protein are also proposed. This second edition also outlines the latest developments in therapeutic strategies, including the use of new PAD antagonists and innovative techniques such as micro-vescicles and stem cells as possible mechanisms to treat these conditions.