Methyltransferase HEMK2 is an enzyme that in humans is encoded by the HEMK2 gene (previously N6AMT1). HEMK2 binds to TRMT112 to form a heterodimer, which performs protein methylation. HEMK2 also has some ability to methylate arsenic, but seems to have a much lesser role in arsenic metabolism than AS3MT. It was previously reported that this enzyme functioned as a N6-adenine-specific DNA methyltransferase, hence its previous symbol N6AMT1, but later studies failed to confirm this result.

Function

The encoded enzyme may be involved in the methylation of release factor I during translation termination. This enzyme is also involved in converting the arsenic metabolite monomethylarsonous acid to the less toxic dimethylarsonic acid. Alternative splicing of this gene results in multiple transcript variants. A related pseudogene has been identified on chromosome 11. [provided by RefSeq, Jul 2014]. HEMK2 functions as a protein glutamine methyltransferase and is essential for mouse development (Liu et al., Mol. Cell. Biol. 2010).

References

Further reading

Peng Liu, Song Nie, Bing Li, Zhong-Qiang Yang, Zhi-Mei Xu, Jian Fei, Chyuansheng Lin, Rong Zeng, and Guo-Liang Xu. Deficiency in a Glutamine-Specific Methyltransferase for Release Factor Causes Mouse Embryonic Lethality. MOLECULAR AND CELLULAR BIOLOGY, Sept. 2010, p. 4245–4253 Vol. 30, No. 17 0270-7306/10/