Tuftelin is an acidic phosphorylated

Phosphorylation

Phosphorylation is the addition of a phosphate group to a protein or other organic molecule. Phosphorylation activates or deactivates many protein enzymes....

 glycoprotein

Glycoprotein

Glycoproteins are proteins that contain oligosaccharide chains covalently attached to polypeptide side-chains. The carbohydrate is attached to the protein in a cotranslational or posttranslational modification. This process is known as glycosylation. In proteins that have segments extending...

 found in tooth

Tooth

Teeth are small, calcified, whitish structures found in the jaws of many vertebrates that are used to break down food. Some animals, particularly carnivores, also use teeth for hunting or for defensive purposes. The roots of teeth are embedded in the Mandible bone or the Maxillary bone and are...

 enamel

Tooth enamel

Tooth enamel, along with dentin, cementum, and dental pulp is one of the four major tissues that make up the tooth in vertebrates. It is the hardest and most highly mineralized substance in the human body. Tooth enamel is also found in the dermal denticles of sharks...

. In humans, the Tuftelin protein is encoded by the TUFT1 gene.

Function

This protein is formed for a short time during amelogenesis

Amelogenesis

Amelogenesis is the formation of enamel on teeth and occurs during the crown stage of tooth development after dentinogenesis, which is the formation of dentine. Although dentine must be present for enamel to be formed, it is also true that ameloblasts must be present in order for dentinogenesis to...

. The function of tuftelins is under contention, but it is proposed that it acts to start the mineralization process of enamel during tooth development

Tooth development

Tooth development or odontogenesis is the complex process by which teeth form from embryonic cells, grow, and erupt into the mouth. Although many diverse species have teeth, non-human tooth development is largely the same as in humans...

.

Other significant proteins in enamel are amelogenin

Amelogenin

Amelogenin is a protein found in developing tooth enamel, and it belongs to a family of extracellular matrix proteins. Developing enamel contains about 30% protein, and 90% of this is amelogenins...

s, enamelin

Enamelin

Enamelin was described in older literature as an EDTA soluble enamel protein. It accounts for the organic portion of enamel, which represents 4% of enamel's mass. It turned out in recent research to be albumin derived from blood contamination....

s, and ameloblastin

Ameloblastin

Ameloblastin, also known as amelin, is a gene-specific protein found in tooth enamel. Although less than 5% of enamel consists of protein, ameloblastins comprise 5%-10% of all enamel protein. This protein is formed by ameloblasts during the early secretory to late maturation stages of amelogenesis...

s.

Research

The human encoding gene

Gene

A gene is a molecular unit of heredity of a living organism. It is a name given to some stretches of DNA and RNA that code for a type of protein or for an RNA chain that has a function in the organism. Living beings depend on genes, as they specify all proteins and functional RNA chains...

 for tuftelin (TUFT1) was cloned by Profs. Dany Deutsch and Aharon Palmon from the Hebrew University-Hadassah

Hadassah

Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America is an American Jewish volunteer women's organization. Founded in 1912 by Henrietta Szold, it is one of the largest international Jewish organizations, with around...

 School of Dental Medicine in Jerusalem.

Interactions

Tuftelin has been shown to interact

Protein-protein interaction

Protein–protein interactions occur when two or more proteins bind together, often to carry out their biological function. Many of the most important molecular processes in the cell such as DNA replication are carried out by large molecular machines that are built from a large number of protein...

 with TFIP11

TFIP11

Tuftelin-interacting protein 11 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the TFIP11 gene.-Interactions:TFIP11 has been shown to interact with Tuftelin.-Further reading:...

.

Further reading