In-vitro Techniques to Study Cell Signaling

Cell is the smallest unit in both plants and animals which continuously communicate with each other or with their environment. Cells have evolved a variety of signaling mechanism involving a network of events which is required to transmit the signals. This whole process is an intricate meshwork of interactions involving the crossroads of chemistry, physics, and biology. Over the course of a hundred million years of evolution, scientists have invented a number of biochemical approaches to explore these millions of biological networks both in vitro (in single isolated cells) and in vivo (in an intact organism) in plants and animals. Some of the in vitro methods developed so far have been talked about in the chapter. Nevertheless, despite technical improvements in the global understanding of signal transduction, its internal structures and its highly integrated and extremely dynamic nature remains largely mysterious and efforts should be made to invent some more rapid and improved methods to better our understanding of signal transduction.