Signaling pathways have an inherent need for noise to acquire information
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Signaling pathways have an inherent need for noise to acquire information Eugenio Azpeitia1,2,3, Eugenio P. Balanzario3 and Andreas Wagner1,2,4* *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Abstract Background: All living systems acquire information about their environment. At the cellular level, they do so through signaling pathways. Such pathways rely on reversible binding interactions between molecules that detect and transmit the presence of an extracellular cue or signal to the cell’s interior. These interactions are inherently stochastic and thus noisy. On the one hand, noise can cause a signaling pathway to produce the same response for different stimuli, which reduces the amount of information a pathway acquires. On the other hand, in processes such as stochastic resonance, noise can improve the detection of weak stimuli and thus the acquisition of information. It is not clear whether the kinetic parameters that determine a pathway’s operation cause noise to reduce or increase the acquisition of information. Results: We analyze how the kinetic properties of the reversible binding interactions used by signaling pathways affect the relationship between noise, the response to a signal, and information acquisition. Our results show that, under a wide range of biologically sensible parameter values, a noisy dynamic of reversible binding interactions is necessary to produce distinct responses to different stimuli. As a consequence, noise is indispensable for the acquisition of information in signaling pathways. Conclusions: Our observations go beyond previous work by showing that noise plays a positive role in signaling pathways, demonstrating that noise is essential when such pathways acquire information. Keywords: Information acquisition in living organisms, Signaling pathways, Noise and information, Reversible binding reactions, Stochastic processes
Background Information about the environment is fundamental when living organisms make decisions that affect their survival and reproduction [1]. For example, microbes detect nutrients and respond by adjusting their growth rate, animals detect predators and respond by fleeing, and plants detect herbivores and respond by synthesizing defense chemicals. At the cellular level, signaling pathways are the main molecular mechanism by which organisms acquire information. They typically detect the presence of a molecular signal or cue [2] about the environment through the binding of this molecule to a receptor. Once the signal has been detected, a chain of intermediary events transmits
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