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PAKs

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Encyclopedia of Signaling Molecules

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Synonyms

p21-activated kinases (PAKs)

Historical Background

PAKs are a family of protein kinases that were first identified in a screen for proteins that interact with the small G proteins Rac1 and Cdc42. Since these have a molecular weight of 21kd, this kinase was named p21-activated kinase (Manser et al. 1994). PAKs are widely conserved and found in yeast as well as in Drosophila and mammals. They are divided into two groups, group I, which consists of PAK1 (α PAK), PAK2 (γ PAK), and PAK3 (β PAK), and group II which consists of PAK4, PAK5, and PAK6 (Rane and Minden 2014). PAK4, which was identified from a PCR screen with degenerate primers based on the PAK2 kinase domain (Abo et al. 1998; Cotteret and Chernoff 2006), is the founding member of group II PAKs. PAK6 was identified as an androgen receptor (AR)-interacting protein in a yeast two-hybrid screen (Yang et al. 2001). The name PAK7 was retired in 2016, since it is no longer considered a separate protein from PAK 5.

PAK Expression

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  1. Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Jianman Guo & Jeffrey Field

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  1. Jianman Guo
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  1. Department of Molecular Science and Technology, Ajou University, Suwon, Korea

    Sangdun Choi

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Guo, J., Field, J. (2018). PAKs. In: Choi, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Signaling Molecules. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67199-4_101590

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