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Dear Stan & Joseph, Many thanks for your responses and for your interest in my naive comments. My interpretation of M. Conrad views in that wonderful abstract is that most molecular recognition events are per se isolated or followed by some very specific pathway. Then in many cases an accessory tool is needed to integrate their specific molecular work into the general cellular processes. In that sense, second messengers are reading and measuring the outcome of quite many microscopy happenstances and driving to a mesoscopic, highly amplified value of their own concentrations (e.g., calcium ions, AMP-cyclic, glycerol... ). This mesoscopic value is broadcast then through Brownian motion to a variety of targets, putting into action other microscopic and mesoscopic processes, etc. In summary, my view is that second messengers represent the transition from many micro- to a meso- and then to many other micro- and so on, in this way driving the general percolation of information flows (Pedro has also written about the measurement roles of second messenger within signaling systems of eukaryotes): I am more interested in the prokaryotes and I am currently working in the signalome of M. tuberculosis (any help will be welcome!! it is awfully complex). Best wishes, Jorge --  |
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