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Chapter 11 Cell Communication Lecture Outline Overview: The Cellular Internet Cell-to-cell communication is absolutely essential for multicellular organisms. Cells must communicate to coordinate their activities. Communication between cells is also important for many unicellular organisms. Biologists have discovered universal mechanisms of cellular regulation involving the same small set of cell-signaling mechanisms. The ubiquity of these mechanisms provides additional evidence for the evolutionary relatedness of all life. Cells most often communicate by chemical signals, although signals may also take other forms. Concept 11.1 External signals are converted to responses within the cell. What messages are passed from cell to cell? How do cells respond to these messages? Cell signaling evolved early in the history of life. One topic of cell “conversation” is sex. The cells of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast of bread, wine, and beer, identify potential mates by chemical signaling. There are two sexes, a and (, each of which secretes a specific signaling molecule, a factor and ( factor, respectively. These factors each bind to receptor proteins on the other mating type. After the mating factors have bound to the receptors, the two cells grow toward each other and undergo other cellular changes. The two cells fuse, or mate, to form an a/( cell containing the genes of both cells. The process by which a signal on a cell’s surface is changed or transduced into a specific cellular response is a series of steps called a signal transduction pathway. The molecular details of these pathways are strikingly similar in yeast and animal cells, even though their last common ancestor lived more than a billion years ago. Signaling systems of bacteria and plants also share similarities. The similarities in signal transduction pathways suggest that ancestral signaling molecules evolved long ago in ancient prokaryotes and single-celled eukaryotes and have since been adopted for n