Despite the protective membrane that separates a cell from the environment, cells need the ability to detect and respond to environmental changes.…

Autocrine signaling is one of the many signaling mechanisms that function inside multicellular organisms to carry out intercellular communication. In…

Paracrine signaling allows cells to communicate with their immediate neighbors via secretion of signaling molecules. Such a signal can only trigger a…

Endocrine cells produce hormones to communicate with remote target cells found in other organs. The hormone reaches these distant areas using the…

Once a ligand binds to a receptor, the signal is transmitted through the membrane and into the cytoplasm. The continuation of a signal in this manner…

The Notch signaling pathway is a major intracellular signaling pathway that is highly conserved over a broad spectrum of metazoan species. It stands…

The gene encoding the main signaling molecules of the Wnt signaling pathways (the Wnt proteins) was discovered almost four decades ago by…

Wnt is a zygotic effect gene that is expressed during very early embryonic development. It regulates various processes in animals starting from early…

The Hedgehog gene (Hh) was first discovered due to its control of the growth of disorganized, hair-like bristles phenotype in Drosophila, much like…

The transcription factor NF-κB was discovered in 1986 in the lab of Nobel laureate Professor David Baltimore, for its interaction with the…

Many cellular signals are hydrophilic and therefore cannot pass through the plasma membrane. However, small or hydrophobic signaling molecules can…

The biological clock is involved in many aspects of regulating complex physiology in all animals. It was in 1935 when German zoologists, Hans Kalmus…

G-protein coupled receptors are ligand binding receptors that indirectly affect changes in the cell. The actual receptor is a single polypeptide that…

Because many receptor binding ligands are hydrophilic, they do not cross the cell membrane and thus their message must be relayed to a second…

Enzyme-linked receptors are proteins that act as both receptor and enzyme, activating multiple intracellular signals. This is a large group of…

For more than 20 years, reverse pharmacology has been the preeminent strategy to discover the activating ligands of orphan G protein-coupled…

Notch signaling regulates the maintenance of neural stem/progenitor cells by cell-cell interactions. The components of Notch signaling exhibit…

The dimeric transcription factor NF-κB regulates many cellular response pathways, including inflammatory pathways by inducing the expression of…