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Noise-Limited Frequency Signal Transmission in Gene Circuits

Cheemeng Tan ^*, Faisal Reza ^*  and Lingchong You ^* 

^* Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Lingchong You, Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708. E-mail: you{at}duke.edu.

To maintain normal physiology, cells must properly process diverse signals arising from changes in temperature, pH, nutrient concentrations, and other factors. Many physiological processes are controlled by temporal aspects of oscillating signals; that is, these signals can encode information in the frequency domain. By modeling simple gene circuits, we analyze the impact of cellular noise on the fidelity and speed of frequency-signal transmission. We find that transmission of frequency signals is "all-or-none", limited by a critical frequency (f_c). Signals with frequencies <f_c are transmitted with high fidelity, whereas those with frequencies >f_c are severely corrupted or completely lost in transmission. We argue that f_c is an intrinsic property of a gene circuit and it varies with circuit parameters and additional feedback or feedforward regulation. Our results may have implications for understanding signal processing in natural biological networks and for engineering synthetic gene circuits.