Dear Readers,
One of my goals with this publication to provide accessible information about cell biology, and ultimately demystify some of what is going on inside the cell. The topic of signaling is one that I have spent a lot of time thinking about, and now it is inextricable from my understanding of how a cell interacts with its environment. It can be easy to gloss over these events and simply look at stimuli and functional responses, especially since one look at a typical pathway diagram can be a bit overwhelming even for just a single receptor. To make it more complex these pathways often converge and can be both activated and inhibited by multiple receptors on a single cell.
Pragmatically speaking this is a viable strategy, so long as one expects they will occasionally receive a surprising result explainable only by some new complexity in that black box. For those who choose to (or need to) go deeper, this journey can be made much easier with some context and that is what I would like to provide here. To this end, I am going to produce a special series of articles covering many aspects of cell signaling with a special focus on the pathways relevant in immune cells but also covering important developmental pathways used in many stem cell systems.
The first of these articles is out now, covering the basics of cell signaling and the major types of proteins involved. This will be followed by specific reviews of individual conserved pathways, describing their constituent members, functional outcomes, and any relevant roles in disease. Attention will then turn to the various type of cell surface receptors that activate cell signaling pathways, including breakout discussions of the B cell receptor, T cell receptor, and important cytokine families. Finally these pathways will be explored in the context of specific cell types, with a focus on the process of signal integration.
I hope that by the end of this series you have a renewed appreciation for the complex inner workings of the cell, and can see how intelligent each cell must be to meet the requirements placed on it by its environment. Cell signaling, like metabolism or replication, is a topic that could be explored in excruciating detail but is still only a portion of the overall context in which a cell operates. These articles are meant to give a pragmatic understanding of the systems at work, but finding anything more interesting is up to you.
Good luck. Stay curious.
-Jeremy