Henry Jay Forman, Jon Fukuto and Martine Torres "Research is to see what
everybody else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought. " --
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Several years ago, one of us put together a book
that dealt with various aspects of oxidative stress and introduced the
concept of signal transduction by oxidants. Since then, the interest in
the mechanisms by which reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (ROS/RNS)
can modulate the cell's response has tremendously grown, paralleling the
intense efforts towards identifying new signaling pathways in which
phosphorylation/dephosphorylation events take center stage. Evidence is
now mounting that production of these species by the cells is required
for their function from growth to apoptosis and numerous signaling
pathways have been identified where the participation of ROS and RNS is
apparent (see Chapters 11-14, 16 and 18). Thus, the field is no more
limited to the group of free radical aficionados who have pioneered this
area of research but has now gone mainstream. While it is satisfactory
for those of us who have been working on this topic for a long time, it
has the risk of becoming the "fashionable" motto where those molecules,
still mysterious to some, become responsible for everything and
anything.
