- Tracy L Raivio: Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada traivio@ualberta.ca.
Proteolysis is carefully regulated to prevent the untimely destruction of critical proteins. In this issue of the , Kim and colleagues identify YjfN as a proteolytic regulator that stimulates the activity of the DegP/HtrA protease of (S. Kim, I. Song, G. Eom, and S. Kim, J Bacteriol 200:e00519-17, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1128/JB.00519-17). The suicide destruction and transcriptional regulation of YjfN limit its activity to conditions in which there are likely to be many misfolded substrate proteins present.