Sex, stress and integrity: the importance of MAP kinases in yeast.

To coordinate responses to environmental and cell autonomous signals, Saccharomyces cerevisiae utilizes distinct MAP kinase dependent signal transduction pathways. This offers the opportunity to compare the activation and attenuation mechanisms of MAP kinases in a single organism, and raises the issue of how the specificity of the individual signal pathways is maintained. Although many recent advances in our understanding of these pathways are due to biochemical reconstitution experiments, the most surprising results and insights have come from genetic analyses.