The STAR family has an extremely diverse role during development and in RNA metabolism. We have concentrated on QKI as an example of this pleiotropic activity and also presented some new data on the role of its conserved 3'UTRs gleaned from bioinformatics analysis of theoretical miRNA binding sites. We review the concept ofa direct pathway from signal transduction to activation of RNA, how this pathway could be the cell's quick response to developmental and physiological changes and how it must be tightly regulated.