Anatomy of a protein kinase spine and how to break it

The post-translational addition of phosphate groups to serine, threonine and tyrosine residues is a fundamental strategy for regulating protein activities in eukaryotes. Eukaryotic protein kinases—the enzymes that catalyze these modifications—are critical to cellular function, and aberrant kinase activities are associated with many diseases including cancer, inflammation, infection, diabetes, hypertension, and neurodegeneration.