The two roles of Ca2+ signaling

Genes are the determinants and limiting constraints of all the possible features a living organism can display. Genes, however, are largely lineage-specific, and a strict focus on them can lead to an overlook of functional analogies existing between organisms belonging to non-related lineages. In the present concept work we propose that: 1) Ca²⁺ signaling is a general, cross-kingdom, regulatory pathway encompassing lineage-specific gene-defined morphogenesis in multicellular organisms, 2) to understand its way of action, Ca²⁺ signaling should be approached from the viewpoint of the functional blocks involved in the execution of migration, proliferation and other cellular-level processes. Two major roles are attributed to Ca²⁺ signaling within this framework: the “classical”, stimulus-transducing triggering role, and a second one, here termed orchestrating, reflecting the responsive regulation of Ca²⁺ signaling properties by Ca²⁺ signaling itself. Approaching Ca²⁺ signaling from this perspective reveals currently hard-to-formalize general structural features of living organisms, experimental validation of which would otherwise require an extremelly large number of “wet” analyses, and to which bioinformatics methods alone can be blind.