Calcium encoding

Calcium encoding (also referred to as Ca encoding or calcium information processing) is an intracellular signaling pathway used by many cells to transfer, process and encode external information detected by the cell. In cell physiology, external information is often converted into intracellular calcium dynamics. The concept of calcium encoding explains how Ca ions act as intracellular messengers, relaying information within cells to regulate their activity. Given the ubiquity of Ca ions in cell physiology, Ca encoding has also been suggested as a potential tool to characterize cell physiology in health and disease. The mathematical bases of Ca encoding have been pioneered by work of Joel Keizer and Hans G. Othmer on calcium modeling in the 1990s and more recently they have been revisited by Eshel Ben-Jacob, Herbert Levine and co-workers.