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Upstream of the mammalian target of rapamycin: do all roads pass through mTOR?

Oncogene volume 25, pages 6347–6360 (2006)Cite this article

Abstract

The mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) is a serine/threonine kinase that controls many aspects of cellular physiology, including transcription, translation, cell size, cytoskeletal organization and autophagy. Recent advances in the mTOR signaling field have found that mTOR exists in two heteromeric complexes, mTORC1 and mTORC2. The activity of mTORC1 is regulated by the integration of many signals, including growth factors, insulin, nutrients, energy availability and cellular stressors such as hypoxia, osmotic stress, reactive oxygen species and viral infection. In this review we highlight recent advances in the mTOR signaling field that relate to how the two mTOR complexes are regulated, and we discuss stress conditions linked to the mTOR signaling network that have not been extensively covered in other reviews. Given the diversity of signals that have been shown to impinge on mTOR, we also speculate on other signal-transduction pathways that may be linked to mTOR in the future.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Eunjung Kim, Heather Krueger, Chung-Han Lee and Hong-Jiao Ouyang for critical reading of this manuscript. We apologize to those authors whose work could not be cited owing to space limitations or our inability to draw connections between elements of the primary literature. M.N.C. is supported by a grant from the Program in Organogenesis (5-T32-HD075005), and the work of the authors is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Heath and the Walther Cancer Institute.

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  1. Life Sciences Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    M N Corradetti & K-L Guan

  2. Department of Biological Chemistry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    M N Corradetti & K-L Guan

  3. Institute of Gerontology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    K-L Guan

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Corradetti, M., Guan, KL. Upstream of the mammalian target of rapamycin: do all roads pass through mTOR?. Oncogene 25, 6347–6360 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.onc.1209885

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