CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

In this article we study how simple cell signaling motifsrespond to pulsatile stimuli. Particularly, we are interested in finding whichmotifs display a frequency preference, i.e. a maximum in the response versusfrequency curve. We consider dose-conserved pulsatile input signals, meaningthat the amplitude of the pulses is varied along with frequency to conserveinput dose. When a pulsatile signal stimulates a signaling component, aninitial, transient response is induced, later on a stationary (periodic)behavior is achieved. This last phase is obtained when the stimulation lastsfor a long time compared with the timescale of the signaling component. Severalarticles in the literature have looked for motifs and conditions leading tofrequency preference. However, all of them focus on the stationary response. Inthis article we pay attention to what we call transient frequency preference (TFP),meaning with this that there is a maximum in the frequency-response curve whenthe response is measured in a time window within the transient phase.