Signaling output: it's all about timing and feedbacks

The central questions in understanding signaling pathway specificity are how these pathways encode which stimulus is present and how this stimulus is decoded to yield the correct cell fate decision. In their recent work, Ryu et al (2015) show by stimulation experiments with different ligands how the differential engagement of feedback and feed‐forward regulation leads to different dynamics of pathway activity, which in turn alters cell fate. Moreover, they show that by considering the timescales of the feedback regulations, the different cellular responses can be triggered with pulsed stimulations by a single ligand.