Coordination and Homeostasis in the Response to Multiple Signals: Role of Metabolic Cascades

摘要

Homeostasis is essential to life, but no cel or organism remains in a strictly homeostatic state with regard to all of its components, with all processes proceeding at constant velocity. From time to time, development, differentiation and changes in dietary or hormonal conditions bring about initiatiion, acceleration, slowing down or termination of many chemical processes. Thus a cel receives a wide variety of signals that require an integrated and sensitive response with a minimum of perturbation of homeostasis. What mechanisms allow this type of response?