Pleiotropy enables specific and accurate signaling in the presence of ligand cross talk
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Duncan Kirby; Jeremy Rothschild; Matthew Smart; Anton Zilman
- Source
- Physical Review E. 103
- Subject
- Computer science
Ligand
Molecular Networks (q-bio.MN)
Computational biology
01 natural sciences
010305 fluids & plasmas
Pleiotropy
Cell surface receptor
FOS: Biological sciences
0103 physical sciences
Process information
Quantitative Biology - Molecular Networks
Signal transduction
010306 general physics
Receptor
- Language
- ISSN
- 2470-0053
2470-0045
Living cells sense their environment through the binding of extra-cellular molecular ligands to cell surface receptors. Puzzlingly, vast numbers of signaling pathways exhibit a high degree of cross talk between different signals whereby different ligands act through the same receptor or shared components downstream. It remains unclear how a cell can accurately process information from the environment in such cross-wired pathways. We show that a feature which commonly accompanies cross talk - signaling pleiotropy (the ability of a receptor to produce multiple outputs) - offers a solution to the cross talk problem. In a minimal model we show that a single pleiotropic receptor can simultaneously identify and accurately sense the concentrations of arbitrary unknown ligands present individually or in a mixture. We calculate the fundamental limits of the signaling specificity and accuracy of such signaling schemes. The model serves as an elementary "building block" towards understanding more complex cross-wired receptor-ligand signaling networks.