Information Cascades Within Living Cells
From a basic understanding of biology, we know that certain cells within the human body, and other living organisms for that matter, communicate with one another. The cells transmit chemical signals in response to interactions with their external environment and their needs. Research now shows that these cells have the power to adjust the “volume,” or intensity with which it responds to the chemical signals. Moreover, inter-cell communication is “a two-way street.”
We can apply the basic concept of the information cascade to the way in which living cells communicate with one another. Information cascades occur when decisions are made based upon the decisions of others and independently of private information. When attempting to pass information along, an external force, which causes a signaling molecule to be activated, first prompts information resulting in a flow of “messages” being passed along to various molecular structures and parts within the cell. The passing along of these “messages” or signals is in the formation of a cascade, as the various cellular structures carry the information along to their destination. This particular type of cascade has been referred to as a “signaling cascade.”
What the new research has found, however, is that living cells do not just blindly pass along the signals, without taking into account their surroundings and other factors that would be impacted if the signal were to be passed along. That is, unlike an information cascade, decisions to pass a signal along within a cell are working based on private information. For example, the findings argue, if a cell were to receive a signal that it should produce a certain hormone, the receptor of this signal would look at information such as whether it had already produced the hormone, and use this determination in judging whether to make the decision to pass along the message or not.
This finding, which changes our perception that the passing along of information within a cell was a “blind” process in which receptors essentially just did as they were told, is a unique breakthrough. The applications of this newly-found knowledge will be used in a variety of fields and will help us to further our understanding of the cells that make up ourselves.
“Living cells say: Can you hear me now?” by David L. Chandler, MIT News (November 17, 2011)
<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/cell-signaling-received-1117.html>