Hippo signaling pathway in Drosophila melanogaster

The Hippo pathway restricts tissue growth by limiting the activity of the transcriptional coactivator Yorkie. At the apical cortex of epithelial cells, the Kibra-Expanded-Merlin complex promotes activation of the Ste20-like kinase Hippo, which with its scaffold Salvador phosphorylates and activates the NDR family kinase Warts and its coactivator Mats. Warts phosphorylates Yorkie, which leads to its retention in the cytoplasm. When the pathway is off, Yorkie enters the nucleus and, with the TEAD transcription factor Scalloped, activates genes that promote cell proliferation and inhibit apoptosis, such as cycE, diap1 and bantam.

Boundary. The module contains the Kibra-Ex-Mer complex, the core kinase cassette and the Yorkie output. Scalloped (sd) is not a member of the FlyBase Hippo groups and is added as the textbook DNA-binding partner of Yorkie. Upstream inputs (Fat-Dachsous, Crumbs, Tao-1, Echinoid) and the many positive and negative regulators are FlyBase regulator sets and not parts. FlyBase groups realized by this module: KEM (FBgg0000914), SWH (FBgg0000917). Subgroups folded into it: SWH-C. FlyBase also curates regulator sets for this pathway, which are context and not modelled as parts: SWH-P (positive regulators of hippo signaling pathway, 40 genes); SWH-N (negative regulators of hippo signaling pathway, 49 genes). Participants were generated from the FlyBase gene-group membership and mapped to UniProtKB by projects/FLYBASE_GENE_GROUPS/generate_modules.py from module_specs/dmel_hippo_signaling.yaml. None of the member genes has a gene review in this repository yet.