BIOPHYSICAL THEORY AND MODELING |
Noise-limited frequency signal transmission in gene circuits
Cheemeng Tan 1, Faisal Reza 1 and Lingchong You 1*
1 Duke University
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: you{at}duke.edu.
Submitted on April 6, 2007
Revised on May 17, 2007
Accepted on 10 July 2007
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Abstract |
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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 was "all-or-none," limited by a critical frequency (fc). Signals with frequencies smaller than fc are transmitted with high fidelity, while those with frequencies greater than fc are severely corrupted or completely lost in transmission. We argue that fc 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.
Key Words:
Biological rhythms, Cellular noise, Gene circuits, synthetic biology, systems biology
