Tuesday, January 31, 2012

And It Begins Again...

Break's over and our blogs begin once again!

So this article talked about transcriptional  regulation of gene expression during osmotic stress. Now even though stress can suppress growth and proliferation, cells can induce adaptive responses allowing them to maintain growth and proliferation functions under stress. There have been numerous studies on the inhibitory effects of stress on cells, but not much is known about how growth-promoting pathways influence stress response. To find out more information, researchers decided to analyze the effect of mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), a central growth controller, on the osmotic stress response.
 This picture demonstrates mTOR's role in the process of 
the cell sustaining cell size and proliferative capacity.

Researchers found that mammalian cells that were exposed to moderate hypertonicity maintained active mTOR. mTOR was required to sustain their cell size and proliferative capacity. mTOR regulated the induction of diverse osmostress response genes. These genes included targets of the tonicity-responsive transcription factor NFAT5 and NFAT5-independent genes. Genes that were sensitive to mTOR-included regulators of stress responses, growth and proliferation. Among these genes, researchers identified REDD1 and REDD2, which had been previously characterized as mTOR inhibitors in other stress contexts. mTOR facilitated transcription-permissive conditions for several osmoresponsive genes by enhancing histone H4 acetylation and RNA polymerase II being present at the scene.

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