Spatio-temporal Regulation of GPCR mediated MAPK Transactivation in Living Cells

Abstract

Signal transduction is a mode of cellular communication essential for an organism’s sustenance and survival. Cell communication in higher organisms is largely executed by two classes of cell surface receptors i.e. G-protein coupled Receptors (GPCRs) and receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs). Though the activation of each of these receptors have shown to regulate cellular responses through a linear pathway the underlying signaling events are much more complicated. A number of studies have shown that the signaling regulators of the RTK mediated pathway can be cross-activated by GPCRs activation via a process termed as ‘transactivation.’ However, these studies are limited, as they have largely missed the spatio-temporal dynamics of the signaling regulators involved in the transactivation pathway. With this premise, the present research was structured to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of MAPK cascade transactivated by GPCR signalling pathways in live cells. Towards this broad objective, we subdivided the study into three part