Molecular and Cellular Signaling - Martin Beckerman







Series Preface

The fields of biological and medical physics and biomedical engineering are

broad, multidisciplinary, and dynamic. They lie at the crossroads of frontier

research in physics, biology, chemistry, and medicine. The Biological and

Medical Physics/Biomedical Engineering series is intended to be comprehensive,

covering a broad range of topics important to the study of the

physical, chemical, and biological sciences. Its goal is to provide scientists

and engineers with textbooks, monographs, and reference works to address

the growing need for information.



Books in the series emphasize established and emergent areas of science

including molecular, membrane, and mathematical biophysics; photosynthetic

energy harvesting and conversion;

information processing; physical

principles of genetics; sensory communications; and automata networks,

neural networks, and cellular automata. Equally important will be coverage

of applied aspects of biological and medical physics and biomedical engineering,

such as molecular electronic components and devices, biosensors,

medicine, imaging, physical principles of renewable energy production,

advanced prostheses, and environmental control and engineering.



Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Elias Greenbaum

Series Editor-in-Chief







Preface

This text provides an introduction to molecular and cellular signaling

in biological systems. Cells partition their core cellular processes into a fixed

infrastructure and a control layer. Proteins in the control layer, the subject

of this textbook, function as signals, as receptors of the signals, as transcription

factors that turn genes on and off,

and as signaling transducers and

intermediaries. The signaling and regulatory proteins and associated small

molecules make contact with the fixed infrastructure responsible for metabolism,

growth, replication, and reproduction at well-defined control points,

where the signals are converted into cellular responses.



The text is aimed at a broad audience of students and other individuals

interested in furthering their understanding of how cells regulate and coordinate

their core activities.

Malfunction in the control layer is responsible

for a host of human disorders ranging from neurological disorders to

cancers. Most drugs target components in the control layer, and difficulties

in drug design are intimately related to the architecture of the control layer.

The text will assist students and individuals in medicine and pharmacology

interested in broadening their understanding of how the control layer

works. To further that goal, there are chapters on cancers and apoptosis,

and on bacteria and viruses. In those chapters not specifically devoted to

pathogens, connections between diseases, drugs, and signaling are made.

The target audience for this text includes students in chemistry, physics,

and computer science who intend to work in biological and medical physics,

and bioinformatics and systems biology.To assist them, the textbook includes

a fair amount of background information on the main points of these areas.

The first five chapters of the book are mainly background and review

chapters. Signaling in the immune, endocrine (hormonal), and nervous

systems is covered, along with cancer, apoptosis, and gene regulation.





Biological systems are stunningly well engineered. Proof of this is all

around us. It can be seen in the sheer variety of life on Earth, all built pretty

much from the same building blocks and according to the same assembly

rules, but arranged in myriad different ways. It can be seen in the relatively

modest sizes of the genomes of even the most complex organisms, such as

ourselves. The genomes of worms, flies, mice, and humans are

roughly comparable, and only a factor of two or three larger than those of some

bacteria. The good engineering of biological systems is exemplified by the

above-mentioned partition of cellular processes into the fixed infrastructure

and the control layer.

This makes possible machinery that always works

the same way in any cell at any time, and whose interactions can be exactly

known, while allowing for the machinery’s regulation by the variable

control layer at well-defined control points.







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