In the complicated, occasionally counter-intuitive world of signal transduction pathways, sometimes events turn out to be much simpler than first supposed. Such is the case with an important oxygen- sensing pathway, the essential features of which investigators Bill Kaelin at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Peter Ratcliffe at the University of Oxford independently describe in these Hot Papers.1,2
Understanding how cells sense oxygen has potentially important implications for research in cancer, diabetes, and many ischemic diseases. The appropriate delivery of oxygen by the lungs, heart, blood, circulation, and blood vessels to all cells is a delicate operation: Too little oxygen impairs metabolism; too much oxygen is toxic.
The search for the oxygen-sensing mechanism has prompted a variety of theories, many of them complicated, some of them contradictory.3 Though not necessarily the definitive oxygen sensor, the pathway that these teams describe has significance. "I think most people are coming around to the ...
