New insights into receptor regulation.

This review provides a brief summary of certain recent advances in our understanding of receptor regulation, signal transduction, and the diverse pathways by which receptor-ligand complexes are internalized and delivered to specific organelles, together with recycling of receptors back to the cell surface. Emphasis is also given to the importance of methodological advances in receptor isolation, immunologic analysis of receptor structure and function, the development of new instrumentation for microchemical characterization of very small amounts of receptor material, and the increasing use of genetic engineering techniques to isolate the genes for receptors and their regulatory subunits, to transfer such genes between cells, and to study receptor function by creating structurally modified receptors via subtle changes in gene structure.