Definition of chaperone

From Chaperome

Chaperone

From Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:

1 : a person (as a matron) who for propriety accompanies one or more young unmarried women in public or in mixed company 2 : an older person who accompanies young people at a social gathering to ensure proper behavior; broadly : one delegated to ensure proper behavior

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

In biology, chaperones are proteins whose function is to assist other proteins in achieving proper folding. Many chaperones are heat shock proteins, that is, proteins expressed in response to elevated temperatures or other cellular stresses. The reason for this behaviour is that protein folding is severely affected by heat and, therefore, some chaperones act to repair the potential damage caused by misfolding. Other chaperones are involved in folding newly made proteins as they are extruded from the ribosome. Although most newly synthesized proteins can fold in absence of chaperones, a minority strictly requires them. Chaperones were co-discovered by Art Horwich and Ulrich Hartl.

More information on the various types and mechanisms of a subset of chaperones which encapsulate their folding substrates can be found in the article for chaperonins. Chaperonins are characterized by a stacked double-ring structure and are found in prokaryotes, in the cytosol of eukaryotes, and in mitochondria.

Other types of chaperones are involved in transport across membranes, for example in the mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum. New functions for chaperones continue to be discovered, such as assistance in protein degradation and in responding to diseases linked to protein aggregation (see prion).

Protein that can distinguish between misfolded and native proteins.