What is Notch signaling?
Notch signaling is an evolutionarily conserved pathway in multicellular organisms that regulates cell-fate determination during development and maintains adult tissue homeostasis.
What does the Notch gene do?
The NOTCH1 gene provides instructions for making a protein called Notch1, a member of the Notch family of receptors. Receptor proteins have specific sites into which certain other proteins, called ligands, fit like keys into locks.
What developmental decision is Notch signaling involved with?
The Notch signaling pathway plays a key role in the developmental biology of all animals. It is involved in the growth and differentiation of many cell types, and has the ability to control cell fate decisions.
What is the Notch delta pathway?
The signaling pathway consists of the Notch transmembrane receptor and its ligands Delta and/or Jagged. The interaction between the receptor and the ligand of the same cell (cis-interaction) leads to the degradation of both proteins, therefore not generating a signal.
Why is Notch signaling important?
The Notch signaling pathway is a highly conserved cell signaling system present in most animals. Notch signaling promotes proliferative signaling during neurogenesis, and its activity is inhibited by Numb to promote neural differentiation. It plays a major role in the regulation of embryonic development.
What is the outcome of Notch signaling?
Notch signaling can control the patterns of gene expression within a cell by either upregulating or downregulating various genes. These alterations of gene expression can either induce or impair differentiation.
How does the Notch signaling pathway work?
Notch signaling promotes proliferative signaling during neurogenesis, and its activity is inhibited by Numb to promote neural differentiation. It plays a major role in the regulation of embryonic development.
What is the role of ref-1 in Notch signaling?
The Notch signal transduction pathway is highly conserved in animal embryogenesis. The REF-1 family of bHLH transcription factors are major targets of Notch signaling in the C. elegans embryo, and are distantly related to HES proteins that are targets of Notch signaling in Drosophila and vertebrates.
How is Notch signaling induced in neighboring cells?
Competitive Notch signaling can inhibit neighboring cells from adopting the same cell fate through lateral inhibition. This occurs in some cell populations when Notch signaling is induced in neighboring cells by presentation of Notch ligands in the signal-sending cell.
What is the role of notch in the signaling cascade?
Notch is a transmembrane receptor that co-ordinates an important signaling cascade in all species. Notch signaling mediates local cell-to-cell communications as its ligands are mostly other transmembrane proteins, limiting the signaling to its neighboring cells.
How is Notch signaling used in metazoan development?
1. Introduction The Notch signaling pathway plays a central role in patterning metazoan development, and is used in remarkably diverse cell fate decisions (for general review, see Artavanis-Tsakonas et al., 1999 ). C. elegans contains two, closely-related proteins called GLP-1 and LIN-12 in the Notch family of transmembrane receptors.
