Decoding the Notch signal

人体是由数百万个细胞组成的，这些细胞必须正确地组装和维护。为了实现这一复杂的组装过程，细胞之间需要相互通信。他们通过特殊类型的信号做到这一点。其中一个这样的信号使用一种名为Notch的蛋白质作为其接收器。通过Notch发送的信息可以使细胞增殖或改变它们的行为，有时甚至死亡。我们不明白的是，诺奇如何在不同的时间传达如此不同的信息。这一点非常重要，因为我们现在知道，Notch的不适当活动与几种类型的癌症有关，也与其他疾病有关。我们工作的目标是理解Notch在不同时间发送的不同消息的语言，并识别特定的？签名？这将有助于在临床情况下显示Notch是否工作不当。如果是这样的话，这可能会影响应该提供什么治疗。此外，字母？在签名内可以给我们提供关于未来如何开发针对特定癌症的新药的良好线索。我们的大部分实验使用的是果蝇，这为我们提供了一个更简单的模型来解码这些不同的信息。由于果蝇和人类的细胞工作方式有很大的相似之处(Notch最早是在果蝇研究中发现的，大约80%的致病基因可以在果蝇身上找到)，我们相信果蝇实验将为我们提供一条通往临床使用的重要工具的途径。

The human body is composed of millions of cells which have to be assembled and maintained correctly. For this complex assembly process to happen, the cells need to communicate with each other. They do so via special types of signals. One such signal uses a protein called Notch as its receiver. Messages sent through Notch can make cells proliferate or change their behaviours, and sometimes even die. What we don?t understand is how Notch can communicate such different messages at different times. This is of major importance because we now know that inappropriate activity of Notch is responsible for several types of cancers and is linked to other disease too. The goal of our work is to understand the language of the different messages that Notch sends at different times and to identify particular ?signatures? that will be helpful in clinical situations to show whether Notch is working inappropriately. If it is, this may influence what treatments should be provided. In addition, the ?letters? within a signature could give us good clues about ways to develop new drugs for particular cancers in future. We do most of our experiments using the fruitfly, which gives us a simpler model to decode these different messages. Because there are very big similarities between the ways cells work in flies and people (Notch was first found in fly studies and ~80% of disease causing genes can be found in flies) we are confident that the fly experiments will give us a route to important tools for use in the clinic.