Insulin receptor transduction

Loss of the cell s responsiveness to the hormone insulin caused by pathological alterations in the insulin receptor signal transduction pathway, and often leading... 

Like other growth factors, the IDGFs presumably activate a signal transduction pathway that ultimately controls transcription and replication. One possibility is that they interact in some way with the insulin receptor (InsR) pathway, which has... 

Ruan Y, Chen C, Cao Y, Garofalo RS 1995 The Drosophila insulin receptor contains a novel carboxyl-terminal extension likely to play an important role in signal transduction. J Biol Chem 270 4236-4243... 

The insulin receptor substrate IRS couples the insulin receptor to sequential effector molecules (review Ogawa et al., 1998). On binding of insulin to the insulin receptor, the tyrosine kinase activity of the receptor is stimulated. The IRS protein is phosphory-lated at several Tyr residues, which then serve as attachment points for sequential effector molecules as e.g. the Grb2-mSos complex, the P13-kinase and the protein tyrosine phosphatase SHP-2. The IRS protein also has a phosphotyrosine binding domain and a PH domain. Both modules are required for signal transduction in vivo. It is assumed that the PTB domain binds to autophosphorylation sites of the insulin receptor and that the PH domain is involved in membrane association of IRS. 

Signal transduction The binding of insulin to the a-subunits of the insulin receptor induces conformational changes that are transduced to the 3-subunits. This promotes a rapid autophosphorylation of a specific tyrosine residue on each 3-subunit (see Figure 23.7). Autophosphorylation initiates a cascade of cellsignaling responses, including phosphorylation of a family of pro teins called insulin receptor substrate (IRS) proteins. At least four... 

Biener, Y., Feinstein, R., Mayak, M., Kaburaqi, Y., Kadowaki, T. and Y. Zick, 1996, Annexin II is a novel player in insulin signal transduction. Possible association between annexin II phosphorylation and insulin receptor internalization. J. Biol. Chem. 271, 29489-29496. 

As work with vanadium compounds and diabetes in cell system has continued, it has become clear that there are also insulin-independent mechanisms at work. One insulin-independent signal transduction pathway appears to be involved in glycogen metabolism reactions in rat adipocytes [137] that also involve PI-3K. A major difference was that only vanadate promoted glycogenesis through the activation of a cytosolic protein tyrosine kinase, which was mediated in an insulin receptor-independent manner. 

Vanadate stimulates protein kinases in the cytosol, as demonstrated in adipose cells and extracts. The activation of a membrane and cytosolic protein tyrosine kinase have been demonstrated in adipocytes, and the membranous enzyme has been postulated to be a way to involve PI-3K actions without activation of insulin receptor substrate-1 (IRS-1) in the insulin signal transduction pathway [140], It is always difficult to determine if protein kinase activation is direct or the result of stimulation of a protein phosphatase. The fact that kinase stimulation was seen in isolated extracts after cell disintegration in this adipocyte cell system supports the idea that vanadium addition to cells could directly stimulate kinases via an as-yet-undetermined mechanism. In other experiments with 3T3-L1 adipocytes bis(acetylacetonato)oxovana-dium (IV) BMOV and bis(l-N-oxide-pyridine-2thiolato)oxovanadium (TV) caused increased tyrosine phosphorylation of both the insulin receptor and IRS-1 in a synergistic way with insulin, as measured by antibodies to phosphotyrosine residues [141]. 

Fig. 2. Signal transduction through an enzyme-linked receptor such as the insulin receptor.

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