Information propagation in a noisy gene cascade

MONTEOLIVA, D.; DIAMBRA, L.

Physical Review E

APS

Año: 2017 vol. 96

2470-0045

We use information theory to study the information transmission through a simple gene cascade where theproduct of an unregulated gene regulates the expression activity of a cooperative genetic switch. While theinput signal is provided by the upstream gene with two states, we consider that the expression of downstreamgene is controlled by a cis-regulatory system with three binding sites for the regulator product, which canbind cooperatively. By computing exactly the associated probability distributions, we estimate informationtransmission thought the mutual information measure. We found that the mutual information associated withunimodal input signal is lower than the associated with bimodal inputs. We also observe that mutual informationpresents a maximum in the cooperativity intensity, and the position of this maximum depends on the kineticrates of the promoter. Furthermore, we found that the bursting dynamics of the input signal can enhance theinformation transmission capacity.