Figure 1.

A scheme of apoptosis induced by various modifications of GAPDH. Modifications of the catalytic cysteine in GAPDH decrease the affinity of NAD⁺ for the protein, which results in a release of NAD⁺ from the active center, destabilization of the tetramer, and its dissociation into subunits. The subunits penetrate to the nucleus via passive transport. In the nucleus, unfolding of the GAPDH subunits leads to the exposure of the nuclear export signal (NES) and the subsequent transport of the unfolded GAPDH subunits to the cytoplasm, where they form aggregates (according to [34,35,37,39]).