Distributing tasks via multiple input pathways increase cellular survival in stress
- University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- Imperial College London, United Kingdom
- University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Abstract
Improving in one aspect of a task can undermine performance in another, but how such opposing demands play out in single cells and impact on fitness is mostly unknown. Here we study budding yeast in dynamic environments of hyperosmotic stress and show how the corresponding signalling network increases cellular survival both by assigning the requirements of high response speed and high response accuracy to two separate input pathways and by having these pathways interact to converge on Hog1, a p38 MAP kinase. Cells with only the less accurate, reflex-like pathway are fitter in sudden stress, whereas cells with only the slow, more accurate pathway are fitter in fluctuating but increasing stress. Our results demonstrate that cellular signalling is vulnerable to trade-offs in performance, but that these trade-offs can be mitigated by assigning the opposing tasks to different signalling subnetworks. Such division of labour could function broadly within cellular signal transduction.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Human Frontier Science Program (Research grant)
- Matthew M Crane
- Peter Swain
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (Responsive mode grant)
- Matthew M Crane
- Peter Swain
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/N014391/1)
- Alejandro A Granados
- Reiko J Tanaka
- Margaritis Voliotis
Wellcome Trust (PhD studentship)
- Luis F Montano-Gutierrez
Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (PhD studentship)
- Alejandro A Granados
- Luis F Montano-Gutierrez
SULSA
- Matthew M Crane
- Peter Swain
Medical Research Council (Fellowship)
- Margaritis Voliotis
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Granados et al.
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.
Metrics
-
- 2,257
- views
-
- 433
- downloads
-
- 51
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Citations by DOI
-
- 51
- citations for umbrella DOI https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.21415
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Distributing tasks via multiple input pathways increase cellular survival in stress
eLife 6:e21415.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.21415
