CRYAA

Mammalian lens crystallins are divided into alpha, beta, and gamma families. Alpha crystallins are composed of two gene products: alpha-A and alpha-B, for acidic and basic, respectively. Alpha crystallins can be induced by heat shock and are members of the small heat shock protein (HSP20) family. They act as molecular chaperones although they do not renature proteins and release them in the fashion of a true chaperone; instead they hold them in large soluble aggregates. Post-translational modifications decrease the ability to chaperone. These heterogeneous aggregates consist of 30-40 subunits; the alpha-A and alpha-B subunits have a 3:1 ratio, respectively. Two additional functions of alpha crystallins are an autokinase activity and participation in the intracellular architecture. The encoded protein has been identified as a moonlighting protein based on its ability to perform mechanistically distinct functions. Alpha-A and alpha-B gene products are differentially expressed; alpha-A is preferentially restricted to the lens and alpha-B is expressed widely in many tissues and organs. Defects in this gene cause autosomal dominant congenital cataract (ADCC). [provided by RefSeq, Jan 2014]

Description

Crystallin alpha A

Tissue specificity

Group enriched (kidney, retina)

Subcell location

Nucleoplasm, Cytosol

Predicted location

Intracellular

Protein family

Disease related genes
Human disease related genes
Mapped to neXtProt
Mapped to UniProt SWISS-PROT
Plasma proteins
Predicted intracellular proteins
Protein evidence (Ezkurdia et al 2014)
Protein evidence (Kim et al 2014)

Chromosome

21 (43169008 - 43172805)

Ensembl ID

ENSG00000160202  (ver. 103.38)

Orthologs

-

UniProt

P02489

neXtProt

NX_P02489

Human splice variants

Protein structure