Studies On The Roles Of Vitamin D Receptor On The Regulation Of Gene Expression In Jurkat Cells

The classical mechanism for nuclear receptors to regulate gene expression is to bind the hormone response element(HRE) on the target gene in the presence of their ligands. Recent studies showed that nuclear hormone can mediate many cell response without the binding of its nuclear receptor. And nuclear receptors also can transactivate gene expression in the absence of their ligands. We called nuclear receptor transcriptional factor, because we only know this aspect of it. In fact, nuclear receptors play very important roles in many of the essential cell process, such as cell growth, development, differentiation and viability, all their functions are far beyond as transcriptional factors. It is now known that some nuclear receptors can associate with cytoskeleton which play an important role in gene regulation, signal transduction, and cell cycle control; some can mediate gene regulation in chromatin level. Surprisingly, the signal transduction system also has some relation with nuclear receptors indicating that the activation of nuclear receptor may include the signal transduction from membrane to nucleus.