Research Highlights

Short, accessible synopses of recent important articles concerning signalling pathways.

August 2007

• Cell signalling: The power of NetworKIN

  

  Thousands of in vivo phosphorylation sites have been identified via high-throughput proteome mapping; however, several limitations preclude matching of these sites to specific kinases. Reporting in Cell, Linding and colleagues now present NetworKIN, an integrative computational approach that combines consensus sequence motifs and protein-association networks to predict which protein kinases target experimentally identified phosphorylation sites in vivo.

  Original research paper Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 8 598 - 599 doi:10.1038/nrm2224

• Breast cancer: X-linked tumour suppression

  

  Although abnormalities of the X chromosome have been reported in cancer, almost all identified tumour suppressors are autosomal. Yang Liu, Pan Zheng and colleagues have identified FOXP3, a member of the forkhead/winged-helix family of transcription factors, as an X-linked suppressor of breast cancer, and show that it suppresses tumorigenesis by repressing expression of the oncogene ERBB2 (also known as HER2).

  Original research paper Nature Reviews Cancer 7 568 - 569 doi:10.1038/nrc2200

• Breast cancer: A useful combination

  

  Detecting the genetic alterations that drive tumorigenesis is not an easy task. William Hahn and colleagues tackled this problem by combining genomic and functional analyses to study the Ras pathway, and have identified a novel breast cancer oncogene.

  Original research paper Nature Reviews Cancer 7 570 - 571 doi:10.1038/nrc2197

• Osteoporosis: Building up the bone

  

  Most drugs used for osteoporosis act primarily by inhibiting bone resorption, but do not induce bone formation and so are insufficient for restoring bone in critically osteoporotic patients. Now, Buckbinder and colleagues have shown that proline-rich tyrosine kinase 2 (PYK2) — a member of the focal adhesion kinase family — plays a key role in the regulation of bone formation, and so inhibitors of this kinase might represent potential bone-building therapies for osteoporotic disease.

  Original research paper Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 6 602 - 603 doi:10.1038/nrd2389

• Glia: It's a wrap

  

  Fast nerve transmission is made possible by the discontinuous myelin sheath that surrounds a subset of axons. Understanding the processes by which Schwann cells (SCs), the myelinating glia of the PNS, form one-to-one associations with axons during development (termed radial sorting) may eventually lead to treatments for patients with demyelinating disorders. Two papers published this month unravel a signalling cascade that is critical for radial sorting and reveal a role for the RhoGTPase rac1 in this process.

  Original research paper Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8 572 - 573 doi:10.1038/nrn2197