S. Ghosh, D. Baltimore, "Activation in vitro of NF-kB by phosphorylation of its inhibitor IkB," Nature, 344:678-82, 1990.
Sankar Ghosh (Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Mass.): "This paper brings together two areas of rapidly moving research: the role of protein phosphorylation and control of transcriptional regulation. The inhibitor IkB not only keeps the transcription factor NF-kB in the cytoplasm--away from DNA--but also directly prevents it from binding to DNA. By showing that phosphorylation of the inhibitor can prevent it from binding to the transcription factor, the paper provided evidence for a direct route from cell surface events to changes in gene expression in the nucleus. Such a route is both simple and fast and, presumably, explains why NF-kB is involved in rapid responses to mediators of immunologic and tissue-injury responses."
M.R. Wallace, D.A. Marchuk, L.B. Andersen, R. Letcher, et al., "Type 1 neurofibromatosis gene: identification of a large...