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

Bootman, Martin D.; Berridge, Michael J. and Lipp, Peter (1997). Cooking with calcium: the recipes for composing global signals from elementary events. Cell, 91(3) pp. 367–73.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-8674(00)80420-1

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.

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