Аннотация:Genes are the determinants and limiting constraints of all the possible features a livingorganism can display. Genes, however, are largely lineage-specific, and a strict focus onthem can lead to an overlook of functional analogies existing between organisms belongingto non-related lineages. In the present concept work we propose that: 1) Ca2+ signaling is ageneral, cross-kingdom, regulatory pathway encompassing lineage-specific gene-definedmorphogenesis in multicellular organisms, 2) to understand its way of action, Ca2+signaling should be approached from the viewpoint of the functional blocks involved in theexecution of migration, proliferation and other cellular-level processes. Two major roles areattributed to Ca2+ signaling within this framework: the “classical”, stimulus-transducingtriggering role, and a second one, here termed orchestrating, reflecting the responsiveregulation of Ca2+ signaling properties by Ca2+ signaling itself. Approaching Ca2+ signalingfrom this perspective reveals currently hard-to-formalize general structural features ofliving organisms, experimental validation of which would otherwise require an extremellylarge number of “wet” analyses, and to which bioinformatics methods alone can be blind.