binding to DNA like in transcription activation, discussed above. The study demonstrated that GAPDH is S-nitrosylated by NO in response to cell stress, which causes it to bind to the protein SIAH1, a ubiquitin ligase. The complex moves into the nucleus where Siah1 targets nuclear proteins for degradation, thus initiating controlled cell shutdown. In subsequent study the group demonstrated that deprenyl, which has been used clinically to treat Parkinson's disease, strongly reduces the apoptotic action of GAPDH by preventing its S-nitrosylation and might thus be used as a drug. Metabolic switch GAPDH acts as a reversible metabolic switch under oxidative stress. When cells are exposed to oxidants, they need excessive amounts of the antioxidant cofactor NADPH. In the cytosol, NADPH is reduced from NADP+ by several enzymes, three of them catalyze the first steps of the Pentose phosphate pathway. Oxidant-treatments cause an inactivation of GAPDH. This inactivation re-routes temporally the metabolic flux from glycolysis to the Pentose Phosphate Pathway, allowing the cell to generate more NADPH. Under stress conditions, NADPH is needed by some antioxidant-systems including glutaredoxin and thioredoxin as well as being essential for the recycling of gluthathione. ER to Golgi transport GAPDH also appears to be involved in the vesicle transport from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) to the Golgi apparatus which is part of shipping route for secreted proteins. It was found that GAPDH is recruited by rab2 to the vesicular-tubular clusters of the ER where it helps to form COP 1 vesicles. GAPDH is activated via tyrosine phosphorylation by Src. Additional functions GAPDH, like many other enzymes, has multiple functions. In addition to catalysing the 6th step of glycolysis, recent evidence implicates GAPDH in other cellular processes. GAPDH has been described to exhibit higher order multifunctionality in the context of maintaining cellular iron homeostasis, specifically as a chaperone protein for labile heme within cells. This came as a surprise to researchers but it makes evolutionary sense to re-use and adapt existing proteins instead of evolving a novel protein from scratch. Use as loading control Because the GAPDH gene is often stably and constitutively expressed at high levels in most tissues and cells, it is considered a housekeeping gene. For this reason, GAPDH is commonly used by biological researchers as a loading control for western blot and as a control for qPCR. However, researchers have reported different regulation of GAPDH under specific conditions. For example, the transcription factor