All living organisms need to respond appropriately to changes in the extracellular milieu. Cellular mechanisms that enable such responses evolved in parallel with organismal complexity and intracellular Ca2+ signaling is one such mechanism where extracellular signals received at the cell membrane communicate with endoplasmic reticular stores of Ca2+, to stimulate appropriate Ca2+-mediated changes in cellular physiology. The amplitude and dynamics of endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-Ca2+ release in response to extracellular signals determines the nature of the cellular response. An understanding of how ER-Ca2+ channels might regulate cellular Ca2+ signaling in different cell types is lacking. In a recent paper, this question has been addressed in the context of neurons ( Chakraborty et al., 2023) and the implications of these new findings are discussed here.
Keywords: Ca2+; IP3 receptors; Orai; calcium release-activated channel; endoplasmic reticulum (ER); signaling; store-operated calcium entry (SOCE); stromal-interaction molecule (STIM).
© The Author(s) 2024.