The enzyme classes involved in ubiquitin tagging of proteins that have to be degraded are organized in an hierachical order. A small number of E1(ubiquitin activating) and E2 (ubiquitin conjugating) enzymes face towards a huge and as yet unknown number of E3 enzymes (ligases). Single E2 enzymes can cooperate with different E3 ligases. Single E3 ligases target different protein substrates. Single protein substrates are targets of different E3-ligases. |