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Hedgehog Pathway Essay

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The hedgehog (Hh) signalling pathway is important in ensuring normal and correct development of an organism during embryogenesis (Motoyama et al., 2003), and many important aspects of this pathway are conserved in animals as distinct as the fly and the human (McMahon and Ingham, 2001; Varjosalo and Taipale, 2008), accentuating further the importance of the pathway. Volhard and Wieschaus discovered the hedgehog gene in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in the late 1980s, in their search for mutations that would disturb the body plan of fly larvae. They were able to find genes involved in the segmental pattern of the larva that, when mutated, would alter this segmentation (Nusslein-Volhard and Wieschaus, 1980).

Depending on the situation, the hedgehog signalling can result in different outcomes, for example it could act as a morphogen, a long range signalling molecule that acts in a dose-specific way to induce and establish cell fate within a cell population, or it could act as a mitogen to stimulate cell proliferation, regulating organ development (Ingham and McMahon, 2001; Jiang and Hui, 2008). Human embryos in which hedgehog signalling is defect, acquire brain, face and other abnormalities, demonstrating the vital importance of the pathway during development (Briscoe and Thérond, 2013), while over activation of the hedgehog pathway in adults is known to lead to different types of cancer (Gupta, Takebe, and LoRusso, 2010; Jiang and Hui, 2008). The proteins belonging to the Hh family have been identified as very important with regards to essential embryonic development processes like patterning, proliferation …show more content…

1993), the latter being the best studied (Varjosalo and Taipale, 2008). Only one gene is found in the fly, with Dhh being the closest related to Drosophila hedgehog (Varjosalo and Taipale,

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