2009: signaling breakthroughs of the year

Nominations for this year's signaling breakthroughs spanned physiology, therapeutics and drug development, neuroscience, and plant signaling. Among the most exciting advances in mammalian biology were therapeutic applications of research that are overturning the conventional boundaries of signaling pathways,unexpected mechanisms to prolong life and prevent aging, new insights into schizophrenia and memory, development of a transgenic primate model, and the discovery that the cells in the lungs can "taste" noxious substances. In plant signaling,the nominations converged on the identification of the elusive receptor for the plant stress hormone abscisic acid. Finally, methodological advances were also noted with new techniques in synthetic biology enabling the precise spatiotemporal control of signaling events and increasingly facile methods for creation and analysis of proteomic data yielding tremendous increases in raw data and insights into cellular regulation.