Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 1997 Oct 31;91(3):367-73.
doi: 10.1016/s0092-8674(00)80420-1.

Cooking with calcium: the recipes for composing global signals from elementary events

M D Bootman  1 , M J Berridge, P Lipp
Affiliations
Free article

Cooking with calcium: the recipes for composing global signals from elementary events

M D Bootman et al. Cell. .
Free article

Abstract

Recent studies have suggested that global intracellular Ca2+ signals arise from the summation and coordination of subcellular elementary release events (e.g., "Ca2+ puffs"), although the modes of recruitment of such signals are unknown. In order to understand how cells utilize elementary Ca2+ release events, we imaged Ca2+ transients evoked through the phosphoinositide pathway in HeLa cells using confocal microscopy. During the pacemaker phase leading to the global Ca2+ signal, elementary Ca2+ release events were recruited in (1) frequency, (2) amplitude, and (3) spatial domains. Since each digital elementary event contributes to a small change of the analog cytosolic Ca2+ concentration, the net effect of the advancement in the three domains is to drive the ambient Ca2+ concentration toward a threshold where the signal becomes regenerative, resulting in a global Ca2+ wave.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources