Design of a MAPK signalling cascade balances energetic cost versus accuracy of information transmission

Alexander Anders, Bhaswar Ghosh (), Timo Glatter and Victor Sourjik ()
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Alexander Anders: Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology
Bhaswar Ghosh: Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology
Timo Glatter: Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology
Victor Sourjik: Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Cellular processes are inherently noisy, and the selection for accurate responses in presence of noise has likely shaped signalling networks. Here, we investigate the trade-off between accuracy of information transmission and its energetic cost for a mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signalling cascade. Our analysis of the pheromone response pathway of budding yeast suggests that dose-dependent induction of the negative transcriptional feedbacks in this network maximizes the information per unit energetic cost, rather than the information transmission capacity itself. We further demonstrate that futile cycling of MAPK phosphorylation and dephosphorylation has a measurable effect on growth fitness, with energy dissipation within the signalling cascade thus likely being subject to evolutionary selection. Considering optimization of accuracy versus the energetic cost of information processing, a concept well established in physics and engineering, may thus offer a general framework to understand the regulatory design of cellular signalling systems.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17276-4

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