Surf's Up

Calcium is the shit when it comes to cell messages. It interacts with a ton of things in the cell, such as allowing vesicles to fuse with the membrane in exocytosis, binding to calmodulin, binding to myofibrils in muscle contraction and lots of other really important things. I found this sweet article in JGP about calcium waves in astrocytes.

By poking an astrocyte, Bowser and Khakh induced a wave of calcium that perpetuated around 200 microns from the source of the mechanical stimulus. They used Fluo-3 to track the calcium wave and then analyzed the images to make the sweet figures above.

Then they asked the obvious question, what propagates these waves? I mean, unless you're a veggie, there's a lot of shit going on in your brain. So, in order to determine whether the stimulus was intracellular or extracellular, they blocked the gap junctions, which did nothing. So then they altered the flow direction in the bath, which caused the wave to shift. Bingo people, we have extracellular stimulus. So what's doing this? ATP. After doing some glutamate receptor and P2Y1 (an ATP receptor) blocking, they found out that ATP was sending the signal to the aliens to destroy every major city in the world.