Barbara J. Clark • Douglas M. Stocco
Editors

2014

START Proteins—Structure and Function

It has been remarkable and rewarding to follow the explosion of work on the steroidogenic acute regulatory protein (StAR) and the classification of a new superfamily of proteins based on a shared StAR-related lipid-transfer (START) domain. Over the past 2 decades more than 1700 articles are tagged using “steroidogenic acute regulatory” as a search term in PubMed. This search captures articles on all START domain proteins, although the majority of the articles are on the expression, regulation and function of the STARD1 subfamily (StAR and STARD3/MLN64) with the cholesterol-binding START domain proteins of the STARD4 subfamily (STARD4/5/6) gaining attention.