From the origin of life on earth, cells are continuously exposed to environmental and/or intracellular stressors, and in response to them, cells need to equip themselves with anti-stress mechanisms, e.g., activating protective pathways such as the heat-shock or DNA damage response, to defend and recover themselves. Many stress response pathways are highly conserved, from single-cell organisms to higher-order animals. Protective programs aim to keep the cell alive; however, if these fail or the stress continues, cells may ultimately initiate more destructive stress pathways resulting in cell death. For example, during aging, cellular stress responses decline in function, which results in several of the physiological consequences of aging. Increasingly the importance of cellular stress response and immune system activation is becoming clear, and aberrant stress response pathways are thought to play pivotal roles in a variety of non-communicable diseases ranging from neurodegenerative diseases to cancer to diabetes. Understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms of these multi-component stress response pathways, their crosstalk, and their role in disease will aid the development of therapeutics for these diseases. As such, BMC Molecular and Cell Biology invites submissions on this topic, including but not limited to the following:
● Detection of stressors and downstream signaling pathways, such as the PIKK kinase signaling pathways
● Interplay and crosstalk between protective and destructive stress responses
● Mechanistic insight into the activation of the heat-shock pathways
● Activation of cell death pathways following stress response, including apoptosis, necrosis, cell-stress-induced autophagic death, pyroptosis, ferroptosis, and other cell death pathways
● Insight into the role of aberrant stress response pathways in disease, e.g., the unfolded protein response pathways in neurodegenerative diseases
● Molecular and cellular mechanisms of responding to DNA damage
● Interaction of stress response pathways and initiating innate immune responses during infection
● Molecular mechanisms of the oxidative stress response pathways
● Stress response pathways in bacteria and archaea
● Animal models of stress responses and preclinical disease models
● Role of stress responses in aging
● New insights on the chaperone system, chaperonopathies, and chaperonotherapies
Image credit: Andrii Yalanskyi / stock.adobe.com
