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important to prevent a premature response to the PTTH. Alternatively,
these two pathways may work together to control ecdysone production
in the PG. Perhaps signaling through both pathways is necessary to fully ac-
tivate ecdysone biosynthesis. Investigating the role of transcriptional and
posttranscriptional regulation of components in the ecdysone biosynthetic
pathway as well as the underlying mechanisms will be the key to understand-
ing the changes in the PG activity required to produce pulses of ecdysone.
In most systems, mechanisms responsible for timing the juvenile-adult
transition are poorly understood, in part, because it involves complex inter-
organ communication to monitor numerous internal and external cues
such as organ size, nutritional status, and photoperiod. As illustrated here,
the number of factors that converge on the neuroendocrine system to
control such transition in insects has expanded substantially during the
recent years. However, these studies have also indicated, that as found
for many other aspects of development, the overall architecture of the sys-
tem that coordinates juvenile-adult transitions is conserved. Therefore,
future insights from Drosophila and other insects will continue to serve
as a general paradigm for understanding how metazoans coordinate growth
and developmental timing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
K.F.R. is supported by grant 11-105446 from the Danish Council for Independent Research,
Natural Sciences. N.Y. is supported by NIH grant K99 HD073239 and M.B.O by NIHR01
GM093301.
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