STING structure probed

Despite its painful-sounding name, the stimulator of interferon genes protein, known as STING, is something you want to have around. When active, STING helps ramp up production of inflammatory proteins called interferons and cytokines, jump-starting a part of the immune system. STING was originally identified for its role in antiviral immunity, but multiple companies want to find ways to activate STING to sic immune cells on tumors. At the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, researchers have used structural biology to reveal more about how STING turns on and how the protein activates a cellular tidy-up (Nature 2019, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1000-2, 10.1038/s41586-019-1006-9, and s41586-019-0998-5). The images of these membrane-bound proteins provide scientists with new information to guide the development of molecules to target STING. Zhijian Chen and coworkers used cryo-electron microscopy, or cryo-EM, to get their structural snapshots of STING. They observed how human and chicken STING proteins arrange themselves in