FOX (forkhead box) proteins are a family of transcription factors that play important roles in regulating the expression of genes involved in cell growth, proliferation, differentiation, and longevity.
Some FOX genes are downstream targets of the hedgehog signaling pathway, which plays a role in the development of basal cell carcinomas.
[5] The founding member and namesake of the FOX family is the fork head transcription factor in Drosophila, discovered by German biologists Detlef Weigel and Herbert Jäckle.
Originally, they were given vastly different names (such as HFH, FREAC, and fkh), but in 2000 a unified nomenclature was introduced that grouped the FOX proteins into subclasses (FOXA-FOXS) based on sequence conservation.
[11] A member of the FOX family, FOXD2, has been detected progressively overexpressed in human-papillomavirus-positive neoplastic keratinocytes derived from uterine cervical preneoplastic lesions at different levels of malignancy.