A NEW WAY TO TALK: In classical signaling, receptors (blue) on a target cell transduce an intracellular signal upon binding with transmembrane or soluble ligands, such as chemokines (green; 1), which can originate in another cell or the target cell itself. Signaling triggered by a transmembrane ligand binding to a receptor on another cell is known as reverse signaling (2). In a novel mechanism dubbed inverse signaling, a transmembrane chemokine transduces a signal upon binding with its soluble equivalent (3).THE SCIENTIST STAFF
K. Hattermann et al., “Transmembrane chemokines act as receptors in a novel mechanism termed inverse signaling,” eLife, 5:e10820, 2016.
Kirsten Hattermann knows a thing or two about chemokines. A researcher working with Janka Held-Feindt’s lab at the University of Kiel in Germany, Hattermann has spent the last decade studying these little proteins, which bind—either as transmembrane (tm) proteins or as soluble (s) equivalents that are shed from the membrane or secreted by the cell—to complementary receptors on target cells. Binding of the s-chemokines can elicit several responses in target cells, including cell migration and proliferation, but scientists are still working out the consequences of tm-chemokine binding.
Recently, while investigating chemokine signaling in tumor cells from a variety of human cancers, Hattermann and her colleagues found ...
