Did you get the signal?

The journal Science Signaling from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publishers of the blockbuster journal Science and many other fine journals, produced its first "original research" online last week.

It's not exactly a new journal, it's more of a refocus of an older venture, but this is exciting news nonetheless. (It grew out of STKE, signal transduction knowledge environment, which changed its name to Science Signaling at the start of this year.)

Science Signaling is all about signal transduction, the complex set of mechanisms in which biological signals are received and processed to produce a response.

You'll need a paid subscription to the journal to view the full text or PDF files of articles from Science Signaling. However, with a FREE registration you can view all the current abstracts and editor's summaries (which is usually enough to get the gist of breakthroughs described in the articles), access to discussion forums, and FREE teaching resources. PLUS you get FREE access to all the full text and PDFs of articles since 1991 up to 1 year after the article has been published.

You don't need to register at all to gain access to just the abstracts and editor's summaries.

Click here for details about accessing the journal.

When you look at the table of contents of the Sep 2, 2008 issue, you'll notice a some interesting tidbits of information that will deepen your understanding and appreciation for the key roles played by signal transduction in human A&P. For example:

• There's an article on how microglia modulate neurogenesis
• This one may end up helping students learn better . . . memory formation is affected by circadian rhythms
• During early development, calcium detected by the extracellular calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR) helps promote normal skeletal development

Our textbooks (Thibodeau, Patton series) were among the first introductory A&P textbooks to emphasize signal transduction as a central principle of human structure and function. We saw the trend . . . look at the graph to see how the whole concept of signal transduction has erupted in the last couple of decades (as measured by appearance of the term in journal titles and abstracts). We first introduced the term to our readers in the late 1990s, just as the term--and the concept it represents-- became safety established in the lexicon of human biology.
For a FREE PowerPoint slide that animates the basic concept of signal transduction click here.

For all kinds of FREE slides click here.

For my (slowly) growing list of FREE journals click here.

If you think signal transduction is stupid click here.