The garden of forking paths: recycling, signaling, and degradation.

Three recent papers in Developmental Cell (by Yamamoto et al., Choi et al., and Sigismund et al.) show that the endocytic route of internalization can determine whether signaling receptors are degraded or recycled, and whether they initiate signaling from an endosomal platform. However, the same route can serve opposite functions in different signaling pathways: there is no "unifying theory" of trafficking.