PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Lakshminarayan M. Iyer
AU  - L. Aravind
TI  - Quod erat demonstrandum? No restriction endonuclease fold in MIF
AID  - 10.1101/085258
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 085258
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/11/02/085258.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/11/02/085258.full
AB  - It was claimed in a recently published article that MIF functions as an exo/endo-DNase mediating cell-death upon being induced by DNA damage and PARP1. MIF, for which tautomerase activity has been previously reported, is a member of the tautomerase superfamily which does not feature nucleases. The central premise of the authors to suggest that MIF functions as a DNase is the supposed structural relationship to nucleases of the Restriction endonuclease (REase) fold, which frequently but not always contain a motif of the form PD-(D/E)XK. However, we present evidence to show that this claim is entirely unsupported.