Archive by category | Quantitative

[Research highlight] NF-kappaB signaling goes digital

In a report published this week at Nature, Tay et al. reveal that populations of mouse 3T3 cells exposed to TNF-α show a digital NF-κB response, where increasing TNF-α concentrations lead to a higher proportion of cells with nuclear localized NF-κB — an effect that depends, in part, on pre-existing heterogeneity within the cell population. These results provide another compelling example of the way that studies using single cell measurements are transforming our understanding of cellular signaling mechanisms. Interestingly, these results seem to contrast with another recent single-cell-based study of NF-κB dynamics (Giorgetti et al. 2010), which observed a relatively uniform population-level NF-κB response to TNF-α in human HCT116 cells, indicating that there is still much to learn about the dynamics of NF-κB signaling.  Read more