Overview
Calcineurin signaling cascade is a biochemical pathway employed by cells and organisms to transduce environmental signals into cellular responses. It is a conserved and central signaling pathway in eukaryotic cells and is important for physiological processes such as immune response, learning and memory, apoptosis, cell-cycle progression, and transcriptional regulation. By using a combination of calcium binding, protein phosphorylation and dephosphorylation, transcription factors, and other regulatory proteins, the calcineurin signaling cascade is able to mediate robust and reliable cellular signals. Its significance for health and disease lies in its important role in regulating a variety of cell activities, from immune response to transcriptional regulation. Its importance as a therapeutic target is evident in the fact that inhibition of the calcineurin signaling cascade has been used to successfully treat autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, as well as several types of cancer.