Many extracellular signals stimulate phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase, which in turn activates the Rac1 GTPase, the protein kinase Akt and the Akt Thr 308 upstream kinase PDK1. Active Rac1 stimulates a number of events, including substrate phosphorylation by a subgroup of the PAK family of kinases. The combined effects of Rac1, PDK1 and Akt are crucial for cell migration, growth, survival, metabolism and tumorigenesis. Here we show that Rac1 stimulates a second, kinase-independent function of PAK1. The PAK1 kinase domain serves as a scaffold to facilitate Akt stimulation by PDK1 and to aid recruitment of Akt to the membrane. PAK differentially activates subpopulations of Akt. These findings reveal scaffolding functions of PAK that regulate the efficiency, localization and specificity of the PDK1-Akt pathway.

In Japan, the first endoscopic surgery, a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, was performed in 1990. Since then, operative procedures have been standardized, and the safety and efficacy of endoscopic surgery have been evaluated. In accordance with the social acceptance of endoscopic surgery as a less invasive type of surgery, the number of endoscopic procedures performed has increased in all surgical domains. The Japan Society for Endoscopic Surgery (JSES) has played an important role in the development of endoscopic surgery in Japan. Notably, a technical skills certification system for surgeons was established by the JSES to train instructors on how to teach safe endoscopic surgery. Furthermore, the JSES has conducted a national survey every two years to evaluate the status of endoscopic surgery over time. In 2017, 248 743 patients underwent endoscopic surgery in all surgical domains, such as abdominal, thoracic, mammary and thyroid gland, cardiovascular, obstetrics and gynecology, urologic, orthopedic, and plastic surgery. The 14th National Survey of Endoscopic Surgery conducted by the JSES demonstrated the status of laparoscopic surgery in Japan in 2016‐2017.

Directed cell migration is controlled by extracellular cues such as growth factors/chemokines and extracellular matrix. In a migrating cell, a subset of microtubules becomes stabilized, and this stabilization is implicated in the establishment and maintenance of cell polarity. It is still not fully understood, however, how extracellular cues regulate the dynamics of microtubules. Here we show that the PI3K-Akt signaling pathway plays a pivotal role in growth factor regulation of microtubule stability. Treatment of NIH 3T3 fibroblasts with platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) increases the amount of stabilized microtubules, and this increase is abrogated by the addition of a PI3K inhibitor or by expression of a dominant-negative form of Akt (DN-Akt), but not by the addition of a MEK inhibitor. Expression of an active form of Akt slightly increases the bulk amount of stabilized microtubules. Stabilization of microtubules induced in edge cells in the wounded monolayer culture is also attenuated by the PI3K inhibitor treatment or by expression of DN-Akt. Given that Akt is activated at the leading edge of a migrating cell and plays an essential role in directed cell migration, these results reveal a novel mechanism linking extracellular cues to directed cell migration, namely Akt regulation of microtubule stability.

Background : Previous studies have shown that phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase (PI3K) plays an important role in NGF (nerve growth factor)-induced neurite elongation. However, the roles of the PI3K pathway in neurite branch formation were not fully understood. Also, it was not clear where the PI3K pathway is activated during branch formation.

Chloromonas is distinguished from Chlamydomonas primarily by the absence of pyrenoids, which are structures that are present in the chloroplasts of most algae and are composed primarily of the CO2-fixing enzyme Rubisco. In this study we compared sequences of the rbcL (Rubisco large subunit-encoding) genes of pyrenoid-less Chloromonas species with those of closely related pyrenoid-containing Chlamydomonas species in the "Chloromonas lineage" and with those of 45 other green algae. We found that the proteins encoded by the rbcL genes had a much higher level of amino acid substitution in members of the Chloromonas lineage than they did in other algae. This kind of elevated substitution rate was not observed, however, in the deduced proteins encoded by two other chloroplast genes that we analyzed: atpB and psaB. The rates of synonymous and nonsynonymous nucleotide substitutions in the rbcL genes indicate that the rapid evolution of these genes in members of the Chloromonas lineage is not due to relaxed selection (as it presumably is in parasitic land plants). A phylogenetic tree based on rbcL nucleotide sequences nested two Chlamydomonas species as a "pyrenoid-regained" clade within a monophyletic Chloromonas "pyrenoid-lost" clade. Character-state optimization with this tree suggested that the loss and the regain of pyrenoids were accompanied by eight synapomorphic amino acid replacements in the Rubisco large subunit, four of which are positioned in the region involved in its dimerization. However, both the atpB and the psaB sequence data gave robust support for a rather different set of phylogenetic relationships in which neither the "pyrenoid-lost" nor the "pyrenoid-regained" clade was resolved. The appearance of such clades in the rbcL-based tree may be an artifact of convergent evolutionary changes that have occurred in a region of the large subunit that determines whether Rubisco molecules will aggregate to form a visible pyrenoid.