The dynamic mechanism of noisy signal decoding in gene regulation.
Experimental evidence supports that signaling pathways can induce different dynamics of transcription factor (TF) activation, but how an input signal is encoded by such a dynamic, noisy TF and further decoded by downstream genes remains largely unclear. Here, using a system of stochastic transcription with signal regulation, we show that (1) keeping the intensity of the signal noise invariant but prolonging the signal duration can both enhance the mutual information (MI) and reduce the energetic cost (EC); (2) if the signal duration is fixed, the larger MI needs the larger EC, but if the signal period is fixed, there is an optimal time that the signal spends at one lower branch, such that MI reaches the maximum; (3) if both the period and the duration are simultaneously fixed, increasing the input noise can always enhance MI in the case of transcription regulation rather than in the case of degradation regulation. In addition, we find that the input noise can induce stochastic focusing in a regulation-dependent manner. These results reveal not only the dynamic mechanism of noisy signal decoding in gene regulation but also the essential role of external noise in controlling gene expression levels.
School of Mathematics, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, People's Republic of China.
Peijiang
P
Liu
School of Mathematics, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, People's Republic of China.|Department of Mathematics College of Information Science and Technology Hainan University, Haikou 570228, People's Republic of China.
Haohua
H
Wang
School of Mathematics and Information Science, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou 510006, People's Republic of China.
Lifang
L
Huang
School of Mathematics, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, People's Republic of China.
Tianshou
T
Zhou
D000465:Algorithms; D001412:Bacillus subtilis / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D004734:Energy Metabolism / Q000235:genetics*; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D006801:Humans; D008957:Models, Genetic; D012441:Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D015398:Signal Transduction; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio; D014157:Transcription Factors / Q000235:genetics* / Q000378:metabolism; D014158:Transcription, Genetic; D014407:Tumor Cells, Cultured
D014157:Transcription Factors