Historical Background
Vesl/Homer proteins are a family of scaffolding molecules, encoded by three genes (Homer-1, Homer-2, and Homer-3) that are abundantly expressed in a variety of tissues, including the brain, retina, cardiac muscle, skeletal muscle, smooth muscle, liver, kidneys, spleen, testis, thymus, placenta, and intestine. Their primary function is to cluster proteins and modulate their activity. Despite their system-wide expression, Homer proteins are best characterized in the brain and the central nervous system, where their primary role is to cluster and modulate the function of synaptic proteins.
Molecular Determinants of Vesl/Homer Proteins
In mammals, Vesl/Homer proteins are encoded by three genes, Homer-1, Homer-2, and Homer-3, that give rise to at least 22 splice variants. Homer-1a and Ania-3 are short isoforms encoded by the Homer-1 gene (Sgambato-Faure et al. 2006; Duncan et al. 2005). Both splice variants were originally identified after...
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Acknowledgments
This chapter is part of the Encyclopedia of Signaling Molecules, 2nd Edition and is based on a chapter of the same name previously published in the first edition of Encyclopedia of Signaling Molecules. This study was supported in part by grants EY014227 and EY022774 from NIH/NEI; RR022570 and RR027093 from NIH/NCRR and NIH/NIGMS; and AG010485, AG022550, and AG027956 from NIH/NIA, by the Felix and Carmen Sabates Missouri Endowed Chair in Vision Research (PK) and the Dr. John P. and Therese E. Mulcahy Endowed Professorship in Ophthalmology (SK). We thank Margaret, Richard, and Sara Koulen for generous support and encouragement.
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Kaja, S., Payne, A.J., Grillo, S.L., Koulen, P. (2018). Homer. In: Choi, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Signaling Molecules. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67199-4_372
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67199-4_372
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