Cellular Stress Journals
Cellular
stress response is the wide range of molecular changes that cells undergo in response to environmental stressors, including extremes of temperature, exposure to toxins, and mechanical damage. The various processes involved in cellular
stress responses serve the adaptive purpose of protecting a cell against unfavorable
environmental conditions, both through short term mechanisms that minimize acute damage to the cell's overall integrity, and through longer term mechanisms which provide the cell a measure of resiliency against similar adverse conditions
Cellular
stress responses are primarily mediated through what are classified as stress proteins.
Stress proteins often are further subdivided into two general categories: those that only are activated by stress, or those that are involved both in
stress responses and in normal cellular functioning. The essential character of these
stress proteins in promoting the survival of
cells has contributed to them being remarkably well conserved across phyla, with nearly identical
stress proteins being expressed in the simplest prokaryotic
cells as well as the most complex eukaryotic ones.[2]
Stress proteins can exhibit widely varied functions within a cell- both during normal life processes and in response to stress. For example, studies in Drosophila have indicated that when DNA encoding certain
stress proteins exhibit mutation defects, the resulting
cells have impaired or lost abilities such as normal mitotic division and proteasome-mediated protein degradation. As expected, such
cells were also highly vulnerable to stress, and ceased to be viable at elevated temperature ranges.
Although
stress response pathways are mediated in different ways depending on the stressor involved, cell type, etc., a general characteristic of many pathways – especially ones where heat is the principle stressor – is that they are initiated by the presence and detection of denatured proteins. Because conditions such as high temperatures often cause proteins to denature, this mechanism enables
cells to determine when they are subject to high temperature without the need of specialized thermosensitive proteins.[citation needed] Indeed, if a cell under normal (meaning unstressed) conditions has denatured proteins artificially injected into it, it will trigger a
stress response.
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