Cell signaling is one of the most arid parts of the curriculum this semester, and my students have tons of papers to read of too many different subjects. I decided to be the cool teacher and instead of giving them 4 different papers to read (on top of everything else I already gave them to study) I summarized all that information in one nice infographic so they can study easily.
This week we talked about the RhoA protein, its activation and how this little protein can change the shape of a cell in two diferent ways, first by stopping depolymerization and then by enhancing polymerization. I really liked how it turned out, it’s very easy to draw a nice cell membrane using only some circular shapes and some lines, you don’t even need to draw the whole thing, just make the basic structure and then using the clonning tool you will have it ready in less than 5 minutes! I used a different shape in a different color for each protein, that would make it easier to understand and also to remember.
This infographic can be easily modified to represent other cell signaling pathways using the same shapes, moving them around, changing the name of the proteins and rearranging the arrows. You can make as many as you need for your class, or you can make one and show your students how to do it, it will be a different way to study and I’m sure it will help them to remember.
