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Signal transduction

Neither straight nor narrow

Nature volume 400, pages 213–215 (1999)Cite this article

Back when I was a boy, things were simpler. Web browsers fancied spiders, cell phones were used by prisoners to call their lawyers, and signal transduction — the mechanism by which information is transferred from the surface of a cell to its nucleus — proceeded though a linear series of simple steps. But times have changed, and five papers in Nature1,2,3,4,5 (the latest of which are found on pages 271, 276 and 281 of this issue) provide a dramatic example of this. The discovery of new components and connections is converting the stepwise, linear pathways of information transfer into increasingly complex networks.

Most of our cells do not act in isolation — rather, they respond to signals from their neighbours. Much of the cellular machinery is devoted to receiving these signals and then transducing them, relaying information to the components that mediate the cell's response. In the simplest view, these signal-transduction pathways are envisaged as linear wiring diagrams, like telephone lines that link individual customers to the phone company.

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Figure 1: Our humble beginnings — early ideas about the Wingless signalling pathway.
Figure 2: Current picture of the Wingless signalling pathway.

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  1. Curriculum in Genetics and Molecular Biology and Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 27599-3280, USA

    Mark Peifer

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Peifer, M. Neither straight nor narrow. Nature 400, 213–215 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/22214

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