Screening for Natural Bioactive Compounds Targeting the Intracellular Signal Transduction Pathway: Natural Products Modulating the Expression of the Interleukin-2 gene

Human Genome Project has recently been completed and the information on nucleotide sequences of our whole genome is now available at the public or commercial data banks. Next goals are to identify the functions of each gene and to elucidate the intracellular signal transduction pathways regulating gene expression. We have established a PCR-based bioassay to search for biologically active compounds that can modulate the expression of genes encoding important proteins. (omitted)