The Blunt End

Inhibition Bars and the Undrawn Off State in a Teaching Collection of Signalling-Pathway Diagrams, 2004–2025

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions reads 342 pathway figures from one cell signalling unit's slide archive, 2004–2025, as a visual grammar, coding 3,118 drawn relations by glyph, polarity and agent. It finds the off half of the switch rarely drawn (a GTPase-activating protein in 19 per cent of GTPase figures, the inactive GTPase as a node in 18) and inactivation depicted mostly by the blunt-ended inhibition bar, a glyph a 2013 slide template sharpened without adding the inactive state it stands in for. The findings are offered as findings about drawings.

@misc{slop_prirs6,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma and Ylva Onyekwere},
  title        = {The Blunt End: Inhibition Bars and the Undrawn Off State in a Teaching Collection of Signalling-Pathway Diagrams, 2004–2025},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.prirs6},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-blunt-end-prirs6/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}