Faculty of Information Technology and Bionics, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary.
Randall Center for Cell and Molecular Biophysics, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2021 Dec 3;17(12):e1009622. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009622. eCollection 2021 Dec.
Cells can maintain their homeostasis in a noisy environment since their signaling pathways can filter out noise somehow. Several network motifs have been proposed for biological noise filtering and, among these, feed-forward loops have received special attention. Specific feed-forward loops show noise reducing capabilities, but we notice that this feature comes together with a reduced signal transducing performance. In posttranslational signaling pathways feed-forward loops do not function in isolation, rather they are coupled with other motifs to serve a more complex function. Feed-forward loops are often coupled to other feed-forward loops, which could affect their noise-reducing capabilities. Here we systematically study all feed-forward loop motifs and all their pairwise coupled systems with activation-inactivation kinetics to identify which networks are capable of good noise reduction, while keeping their signal transducing performance. Our analysis shows that coupled feed-forward loops can provide better noise reduction and, at the same time, can increase the signal transduction of the system. The coupling of two coherent 1 or one coherent 1 and one incoherent 4 feed-forward loops can give the best performance in both of these measures.
细胞可以在嘈杂的环境中维持其体内平衡，因为它们的信号通路可以以某种方式滤除噪声。已经提出了几种网络基序来进行生物噪声过滤，其中前馈回路受到了特别关注。特定的前馈回路具有降噪能力，但我们注意到，这种特性伴随着信号转导性能的降低。在前翻译信号通路中，前馈回路不是孤立工作的，而是与其他基序耦合以实现更复杂的功能。前馈回路通常与其他前馈回路耦合，这可能会影响它们的降噪能力。在这里，我们系统地研究了所有的前馈回路基序及其所有具有激活-失活动力学的成对耦合系统，以确定哪些网络能够在保持信号转导性能的同时，实现良好的噪声降低。我们的分析表明，耦合的前馈回路可以提供更好的噪声降低，同时可以增加系统的信号转导。两个相干的 1 或一个相干的 1 和一个非相干的 4 前馈回路的耦合可以在这两个方面都提供最佳性能。
