Welcome to the signal transduction and gene regulation group.

Cells in a multicellular organism act in a strictly coordinated manner through communication mediated by different signals. Specific cells recognize specific signals and respond to them by engaging distinct signal transduction pathways. These pathways relay, amplify and integrate signals to elicit appropriate biological responses. In this way, signaling pathways control processes such as cell proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis, cell mobility and regulation of gene expression. Gene transcription is accomplished by the concerted action of general transcription factors, sequence-specific DNA-binding transcription factors, co-activators/co-repressors and chromatin remodelling proteins that assemble on the promoter/enhancer region of a gene. Signalling transduction pathways often consist of protein kinases and protein phosphatases that control the phosphorylation status and activity of these proteins involved in transcription.

Our research group is part of the Department of Microbiology and Virology. Our group is especially interested in the transcription factor cAMP response element-binding protein (CREB) and the mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase and protein kinase A (PKA or cAMP-dependent protein kinase) signalling pathways. We study how these pathways direct the activity of CREB. Moreover, our research focuses on the MAP kinase MK5 (or PRAK). We also employ the promoter of the human polyomavirus BK as a model system to study gene regulation and how signalling pathways may influence the transcriptional properties of this viral promoter and hence the outcome of a viral infection.

More information on the projects is found under the research projects menu.