Monti Michele, Wolde Pieter Rein Ten
FOM Institute AMOLF, Science Park 104, 1098 XG Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Phys Biol. 2016 May 20;13(3):035005. doi: 10.1088/1478-3975/13/3/035005.
Circadian clocks are the central timekeepers of life, allowing cells to anticipate changes between day and night. Experiments in recent years have revealed that circadian clocks can be highly stable, raising the question how reliably they can be read out. Here, we combine mathematical modeling with information theory to address the question how accurately a cell can infer the time from an ensemble of protein oscillations, which are driven by a circadian clock. We show that the precision increases with the number of oscillations and their amplitude relative to their noise. Our analysis also reveals that their exists an optimal phase relation that minimizes the error in the estimate of time, which depends on the relative noise levels of the protein oscillations. Lastly, our work shows that cross-correlations in the noise of the protein oscillations can enhance the mutual information, which suggests that cross-regulatory interactions between the proteins that read out the clock can be beneficial for temporal information transmission.
生物钟是生命的核心计时机制，使细胞能够预测昼夜之间的变化。近年来的实验表明，生物钟可以高度稳定，这就引发了一个问题：它们能被多可靠地读取。在这里，我们将数学建模与信息论相结合，以解决细胞能从由生物钟驱动的蛋白质振荡集合中多准确地推断时间这一问题。我们表明，精度随着振荡次数及其相对于噪声的幅度而增加。我们的分析还揭示，存在一种最佳相位关系，可将时间估计中的误差最小化，这取决于蛋白质振荡的相对噪声水平。最后，我们的工作表明，蛋白质振荡噪声中的互相关可以增强互信息，这表明读取生物钟的蛋白质之间的交叉调节相互作用可能有利于时间信息传递。
