“…Although required for central nervous system development (Alvarez et al, 2006), PDGF receptor signaling has been shown to be neuroprotective after ischemic or excitotoxic insults in developed neurons (Beazely et al, 2009;Sakata et al, 1998;Vasefi et al, 2013). In addition to ligand-induced activation of PDGF receptors, several GPCR agonists including angiotensin II (Heeneman et al, 2000;Wang et al, 2008), dopamine (Oak et al, 2001), endothelin (Gomez Sandoval and Anand-Srivastava, 2011), sphingosine-1-phosphate (Tanimoto et al, 2004), lysophosphatidic acid (Goppelt-Struebe et al, 2000;Wang et al, 2003), and leukotrienes (McMahon et al, 2002) can induce a PDGF-independent PDGF receptor activation, a process known as transactivation. We have recently shown that 5-HT can transactivate PDGFβ receptors in neurons and have elucidated many of the components of this pathway: 5-HT binds Gα i -coupled (and possibly Gα q -coupled) 5-HT receptors, leading to PLC-and calciumdependent PKC activity, and NADPH oxidase that mediates the production of low concentrations of reactive oxygen species (Kruk et al, 2013a(Kruk et al, , 2013b.…”