Abstract
All living organisms need to respond appropriately to changes in the extracellular milieu. Cellular mechanisms that enable such responses evolved in parallel with organismal complexity and intracellular Ca(2+) signaling is one such mechanism where extracellular signals received at the cell membrane communicate with endoplasmic reticular stores of Ca(2+), to stimulate appropriate Ca(2+)-mediated changes in cellular physiology. The amplitude and dynamics of endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-Ca(2+) release in response to extracellular signals determines the nature of the cellular response. An understanding of how ER-Ca(2+) channels might regulate cellular Ca(2+) signaling in different cell types is lacking. In a recent paper, this question has been addressed in the context of neurons ( Chakraborty et al., 2023) and the implications of these new findings are discussed here.