Review on Toll-NF κB signaling pathway in Drosophila

• 1、Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine, North China University of Science and Technology, Tangshan 063000
• 2、School of Life Science & Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092

Abstract：Drosophila Melanogaster is an important model organism to study basic biological and human disease mechanism. Despite lacking an adaptive immune system found in mammal, fruit flies can still response rapidly and effectively to various infections by humoral immunity system. Humoral immunity is an indispensable component of the Drosophila innate immune system, which involving the highly conserved Toll pathway. Toll was originally identified as a type I transmembrane receptor that controls the dorsal-ventral patterning of the Drosophila embryo and subsequently was shown to be involved in host resistance against fungal and Gram-positive bacterial infections. Up to now, there are still missing pieces in this well-studied Drosophila Toll pathway. In this review, we discussed the mechnism and functions of Toll pathway, and the characters of each Toll pathway components, then describe the similarities and differences of Toll pathway between Drosophila and mammals.

Keywords： developmental biology Drosophila humoral immunity Toll pathway Dorsal-Ventral pattern NF κB