8.A.75 The Transmembrane 4 L6 (TM4L6) Family
The human TransMembrane 4 L6 (TM4L6) protein (8.A.75.1.1) interacts directly with the thiamin uptake porter, hTHTR-2 (2.A.48.1.4). These two proteins display overlap in intracellular vesicles and at the cell membrane. Co-expression of hTHTR-2 with TM4SF4 led to a significant induction in thiamine uptake, while silencing of TM4SF4 with gene-specific siRNA led to a significant decrease in thiamine uptake. Thus, TM4SF4 behaves like an activator of hTHTR-2 (Subramanian et al. 2014).The L6 domain tetarspanin TM4SF4 also regluates endocine pancreas differentiation and directed cell migration (Anderson et al. 2011). It is overexpressed in hepatic cancers and plays a role in promotion of cancer cell proliferation (Li et al. 2012). This family is the PF05805 family of Pfam with domain L6_membrane.
TM4SF20 (8.A.27.1.4) is a 4 TMS protein that inhibits regulated intramembrane proteolysis of CREB3L1, inhibiting its activation and the induction of collagen synthesis (Chen et al. 2014; Chen et al. 2016). Ceramide alters (inverts) the TM4SF20 membrane topology (Chen et al. 2016) and reverses the direction through which transmembrane helices are translocated into the endoplasmic reticulum membrane during translation of TM4SF20.