The Language of Calcium Signaling

Ca2+ signals are a core regulator of plant cell physiology and cellular responses to the environment. The channels, pumps, and carriers that underlie Ca2+ homeostasis provide the mechanistic basis for generation of Ca2+ signals by regulating movement of Ca2+ ions between subcellular compartments and between the cell and its extracellular environment. The information encoded within the Ca2+ transients is decoded and transmitted by a toolkit of Ca2+-binding proteins that regulate transcription via Ca2+-responsive promoter elements and that regulate protein phosphorylation. Ca2+-signaling networks have architectural structures comparable to scale-free networks and bow tie networks in computing, and these similarities help explain such properties of Ca2+-signaling networks as robustness, evolvability, and the ability to process multiple signals simultaneously.