Spatiotemporal chemical dynamics in living cells: From information trafficking to cell physiology

Biological thought in the 20th century was dominated by the study of structures at increasingly minute levels. For biology to advance beyond structural reductionism and contribute its full measure to clinical care, living biological structures must be understood in the context of their collective chemical processes at the relevant chemical time-scales. Using high-speed fluorescence microscopy, we have studied intra- and inter-cellular signaling using shutter speeds (∼100 ns) that remove the effects of wave motion and diffusion from optical images. By collecting a series of such images, stop-action movies of signal trafficking in living cells are created; these have revealed a new level of spatiotemporal chemical organization within cells. Numerous types of chemical waves have been found in living cells expressing a great variety of physical properties. In this article I will review some of these basic findings, discuss these events in the context of information trafficking, and illustrate the potential implications of this work in medicine.