The PTK family of receptors plays a central role in the development, differentiation and survival of neural cells. The overall objective of this research program is to understand the function of the ErbB Splice variants of NRG-1 have been shown to serve different functions and this application proposes to first identify NRG2 and NRG-3 variants as they may perform distinct roles.
The second aim i s to identify the sites of expression in the developing and mature nervous system. This analysis should permit the potential identification of a subset of signaling cells. Preliminary findings indicate that NRG-2 and NRG-1 have distinct activities and the third aim proposes to measure these activities in neural and cardiac cells. The distinct bioactivities of NRG-2 and NRG-3 suggest that other NRG and ErbB genes remain to be discovered and aim 5 initiates a search for novel homologs.
