Historical Background
Almost from the time life began, vitamin D has been produced by plants and animals. As the structures of plants and animals became more complex, the sites of vitamin D production, its subsequent metabolism, as well as its sites of action separated. The ability to transport and metabolize vitamin D into more active forms therefore evolved. The metabolic active form 1,25(OH)2D3 of vitamin D exerts its actions through interaction with the vitamin D receptor, VDR (Bikle 2011). Although not as ancient, VDR has been highly conserved between species through evolution (Hochberg and Templeton 2010).VDR is found in almost all cells and tissues of higher-order animals, further emphasizing the importance of the receptor. Evidence for the existence of VDR was first provided in 1969 by Haussler and Norman (Feldman and Pike 2005), and since then a substantial amount...
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von Essen, M.R., Geisler, C. (2018). VDR, the Vitamin D Receptor. In: Choi, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Signaling Molecules. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67199-4_287
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