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Historical Background
In 1984, hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) was first reported as a potent mitogen of rat hepatocytes in a primary culture. The primary structure of HGF became evident with cDNA cloning in 1989, and HGF was simultaneously identified as a novel growth factor (Nakamura et al. 1989; Miyazawa et al. 1989). Meanwhile, scatter factor was identified from fibroblast-cultured media as a scattering-inducible factor toward epithelial cells. The biological activities of HGF and scatter factor seemed unrelated, but subsequent biochemical analysis has revealed that HGF and scatter factor are identical.
Initially, a transforming Met fusion protein, translocated promoter region (TPR)–Met, was discovered in a human osteosarcoma cell line as an active oncogene (Cooper et al. 1984). The proto-oncogene c-Met was later found to encode the transmembrane protein with intracellular tyrosine kinase...
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Sato, H., Aoki, S., Kato, T., Matsumoto, K. (2018). HGF (Hepatocyte Growth Factor). In: Choi, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Signaling Molecules. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67199-4_101701
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67199-4_101701
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