Design principles and specificity in biological networks with cross activation.
Cells sense and respond to diverse environmental stimuli using a set of intracellular signaling components. Often, the signal transduction pathways contain shared components which lead to cross activation at different levels of the pathway. To discover the design principles that ensure signaling specificity is a challenging task, especially for pathways that contain numerous components. Here, we present an analysis of cross-activating pathways and show that a general inhibitory scheme, asymmetric hierarchical inhibition, is sufficient to ensure signaling specificity. Based on this inhibitory scheme, we are able to enumerate all possible network topologies containing two inhibitory links that guarantee specificity. Furthermore, we apply our methodology to the mating and filamentous growth pathways of the yeast model system Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We enumerate the possible ways to wire this model system and determine which topology is consistent with experimental data.
Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Bo
B
Hu
Herbert
H
Levine
Wouter-Jan
WJ
Rappel
D006128:Growth; D048788:Growth and Development; D008954:Models, Biological; D020239:Receptor Cross-Talk; D051964:Receptors, Mating Factor; D012441:Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Q000378:metabolism; D015398:Signal Transduction; D049490:Systems Biology
D051964:Receptors, Mating Factor
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