Meta-Biol

• Pathways

The unphosphorylated form of FOXO1A shuttles between the nucleus and cytoplasm, maintaining a substantial concentration of this protein in the nucleoplasm, where it functions as a transcription factor. Phosphorylation of the protein, catalyzed by activated AKT, causes its exclusion from the nucleus (Zhang et al. 2002).

The normal development of the pancreas during gestation has been intensively investigated over the past decade especially in the mouse (Servitja and Ferrer 2004; Chakrabarti and Mirmira 2003). Studies of genetic defects associated with maturity onset diabetes of the young (MODY) has provided direct insight into these processes as they take place in humans (Fajans et al. 2001). During embryogenesis, committed epithelial cells from the early pancreatic buds differentiate into mature endocrine and exocrine cells. It is helpful to schematize this process into four consecutive cellular stages, to begin to describe the complex interplay of signal transduction pathways and transcriptional networks. The annotations here are by no means complete - factors in addition to the ones described here must be active, and even for the ones that are described, only key examples of their regulatory effects and interactions have been annotated.

It is also important to realize that in the human, unlike the mouse, cells of the different stages can be present simultaneously in the developing pancreas and the linear representation of these developmental events shown here is an over-simplification of the actual developmental process (e.g., Sarkar et al. 2008).

The first stage of this process involves the predifferentiated epithelial cells of the two pancreatic anlagen that arise from the definitive endoderm at approximately somite stages 11-15 and undergo budding from somite stages 20-22. This period corresponds to gestational days 8.75-9.5 in the mouse, and 26 in the human.

Pancreatic buds subsequently coalesce to form a single primitive gland, while concomitantly a ductal tree lined by highly proliferative epithelial cells is formed. A subset of such epithelial cells is thought to differentiate into either endocrine or acinar exocrine cells. A third cellular stage is defined by the endocrine-committed progenitors that selectively express the basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor NEUROG3. NEUROG3 is known to activate a complex transcriptional network that is essential for the specification of endocrine cells. Many transcription factors that are activated by NEUROG3 are also involved in islet-subtype cellular specification and in subsequent stages of differentiation of endocrine cells. This transient cellular stage thus leads to the generation of all known pancreatic endocrine cells, including insulin-producing beta-cells, and glucagon-producing alpha cells, the final stage of this schematic developmental process.

The diagram below summarizes interactions that take place between transcription factors and transcription factor target genes during these cellular stages, and shows cases where there is both functional evidence that a transcription factor is required for the target gene to be expressed, and biochemical evidence that this interaction is direct. We also describe instances where a signaling pathway is known to regulate a transcription factor gene in this process, even if the intervening signaling pathway is not fully understood.

As early steps towards capturing the array of processes by which a fertilized egg gives rise to the diverse tissues of the body, examples of several processes have been annotated. Aspects of processes involved in most developmental processes, transcriptional regulation of pluripotent stem cells, gastrulation, and activation of HOX genes during differentiation are annotated. More specialized processes include nervous system development , aspects of the roles of cell adhesion molecules in axonal guidance and myogenesis, transcriptional regulation in pancreatic beta cell, cardiogenesis, transcriptional regulation of granulopoeisis, transcriptional regulation of testis differentiation, transcriptional regulation of white adipocyte differentiation, and molecular events of "nodal" signaling, LGI-ADAM interactions, and keratinization.