J Cancer 2019; 10(12):2694-2705. doi:10.7150/jca.31877 This issue Cite
Review
1. Department of Gastroenterology, Beijing Chao-Yang Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing 100020, China.
2. State Key Laboratory of Cancer Biology and Xijing Hospital of Digestive Diseases, Xijing Hospital, Fourth Military Medical University, Xi'an 710032, China.
The Slit family is a family of secreted proteins that play important roles in various physiologic and pathologic activities via interacting with Robo receptors. Slit/Robo signaling was first identified in the nervous system, where it functions in neuronal axon guidance; nevertheless, an increasing number of studies have shown that Slit/Robo signaling even regulates other activities, such as angiogenesis, inflammatory cell chemotaxis, tumor cell migration and metastasis. Although the precise role of the ligand-receptor in organisms has been obscure and the conclusions drawn are sometimes paradoxical, tremendous advances in understanding the Slit/Robo signaling pathway have been made. As such, our review summarizes the characteristics of the Slit/Robo signaling pathway and its role in various cell types.
Keywords: Slit, Robo, neuro, angiogenesis, chemotaxis, cancer, motility