title: Noise effects in nonlinear biochemical signaling.
abstract: It has been generally recognized that stochasticity can play an important role in the information processing accomplished by reaction networks in biological cells. Most treatments of that stochasticity employ Gaussian noise even though it is a priori obvious that this approximation can violate physical constraints, such as the positivity of chemical concentrations. Here, we show that even when such nonphysical fluctuations are rare, an exact solution of the Gaussian model shows that the model can yield unphysical results. This is done in the context of a simple incoherent-feedforward model which exhibits perfect adaptation in the deterministic limit. We show how one can use the natural separation of time scales in this model to yield an approximate model, that is analytically solvable, including its dynamical response to an environmental change. Alternatively, one can employ a cutoff procedure to regularize the Gaussian result.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Particle Astrophysics, Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100049 Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Neda
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Bostani
authors.forename: David A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Kessler
authors.forename: Nadav M
authors.initials: NM
authors.lastname: Shnerb
authors.forename: Wouter-Jan
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Rappel
authors.forename: Herbert
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Levine
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D008954:Models, Biological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D020543:Proteome / Q000378:metabolism*; D015398:Signal Transduction / Q000502:physiology*
chemical_list: D020543:Proteome