Limits on information transduction through amplitude and Frequency regulation of transcription factor activity
Abstract
Signaling pathways often transmit multiple signals through a single shared transcription factor (TF) and encode signal information by differentially regulating TF dynamics. However, signal information will be lost unless it can be reliably decoded by downstream genes. To understand the limits on dynamic information transduction, we apply information theory to quantify how much gene expression information the yeast TF Msn2 can transduce to target genes in the amplitude or frequency of its activation dynamics. We find that although the amount of information transmitted by Msn2 to single target genes is limited, information transduction can be increased by modulating promoter cis-elements or by integrating information from multiple genes. By correcting for extrinsic noise, we estimate an upper bound on information transduction. Overall, we find that information transduction through amplitude and frequency regulation of Msn2 is limited to error-free transduction of signal identity, but not signal intensity information.
Article and author information
Author details
Reviewing Editor
- Naama Barkai, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Version history
- Received: January 19, 2015
- Accepted: May 17, 2015
- Accepted Manuscript published: May 18, 2015 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: June 16, 2015 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2015, Hansen & O'Shea
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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