From here :

In any event, the feeling in Greenland was that bottom-up synthesis of anything remotely life-like is barely on the horizon, so that at present redesigning life is most usefully broached from the top down: by simplifying genomes to the point where they become a tractable chassis on which to build new machines. These might make fuels, for example, by digesting recalcitrant plant matter into ethanol or designer hydrocarbons; or they could use a suite of genes from plants and animals to assemble natural-product pharmaceuticals. This is already done to a degree in biotechnology, but the experience of Jay Keasling, at the University of California at Berkeley, of making bugs that produce the antimalarial artemisinin - a process requiring the orchestration of over 40 genetic components - shows how difficult it becomes in such a complicated synthetic pathway. All the same, Keasling anticipates seeing the drug go into production affordably by 2009.

Considerably more dramatic things are in store very soon: whole-genome transplants, where cells are 'booted up' with a new genetic operating system. (The details remain embargoed at the time of writing.) The next step is to do that with a fully artificial genome made by DNA synthesis. This would essentially mean starting life afresh for the first time in 3.5 billion years.

Paxillin is a protein with multiple domains that hangs out at focal adhesions with various other proteins, including integrins. Focal adhesions are essentially points on the cell membrane where the actin cytoskeleton inside the cell is connected up to the extra-cellular matrix in multi-cellular organisms. Thus, the focal adhesions turn out to be useful nodes for signal transduction, where extra-cellular messages can quickly be converted into intra-cellular messages via activity at these adhesions. Paxillin functions as a multi-purpose adaptor protein that is involved in conveying signals and altering the cell's cytoskeleton.

Recently, researchers at UC San Diego published videos of paxillin migrating from the cell periphery toward the nucleus along the cytoskeletal tracks. The interesting and educational video can be downloaded and viewed here.

One more thing. Paxillin, which is clearly very useful in metazoan life, is also found in unicellular organisms. In fact, according to one study of amoba, the paxillin-related signaling pathway is "similar to the one used in mammalian cells." (Flores-Robles D, Rosales C, Rosales-Encina JL, Talamas-Rohana P. 2003. Entamoeba histolytica: a beta 1 integrin-like fibronectin receptor assembles a signaling complex similar to those of mammalian cells. Exp Parasitol. 103:8-15.

From here:

It has been a plausible and long-standing hypothesis that genomic regulatory networks of real cells operate in the ordered regime or at the border between order and chaos. This hypothesis is indirectly supported by the robustness and stability observed in the phenotypic traits of living organisms under genetic perturbations. However, there has been no systematic study to determine whether the gene-expression patterns of real cells are compatible with the dynamically ordered regimes predicted by theoretical models. Using the Boolean approach, here we show what we believe to be the first direct evidence that the underlying genetic network of HeLa cells appears to operate either in the ordered regime or at the border between order and chaos but does not appear to be chaotic.