Current perspective on dominant negative mutations: Trends, scope and relevance

Abstract

Despite the advancements in tools and technologies implicated in identifying and characterizing novel genes, there are still a significant number of unknown function proteins. Moreover, the practices employed in order to characterize such proteins have proven to be a futile exercise so far because of many limitations associated with such traditional approaches. Dominant-negative mutations have shown great promise in this direction as the introduction of mutation in the target protein may abolish the protein function and inhibit the function of the simultaneously expressed wild-type protein. These dominant mutations have broader applications in biological processes to study various proteins in terms of their functional aspects, etiological factors, and mechanism of action, paving the way to diagnose many dreadful diseases, including cancer. Considering these facts, the current review emphasizes utilizing the full potential of such dominant-negative mutations in deciphering protein functions and their broad-spectrum applications in biology.