All living systems acquire information about their environment. At the cellular level, they do so through signaling pathways. Such pathways rely on reversible binding interactions between molecules that detect and transmit the presence of an extracellular cue or signal to the cell’s interior. These interactions are inherently stochastic and thus noisy. On the one hand, noise can cause a signaling pathway to produce the same response for different stimuli, which reduces the amount of information a pathway acquires. On the other hand, in processes such as stochastic resonance, noise can improve the detection of weak stimuli and thus the acquisition of information. It is not clear whether the kinetic parameters that determine a pathway’s operation cause noise to reduce or increase the acquisition of information. We analyze how the kinetic properties of the reversible binding interactions used by signaling pathways affect the relationship between noise, the response to a signal, and information acquisition. Our results show that, under a wide range of biologically sensible parameter values, a noisy dynamic of reversible binding interactions is necessary to produce distinct responses to different stimuli. As a consequence, noise is indispensable for the acquisition of information in signaling pathways. Our observations go beyond previous work by showing that noise plays a positive role in signaling pathways, demonstrating that noise is essential when such pathways acquire information.

中文翻译：

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信号传导途径固有地需要噪声来获取信息

所有生命系统都会获取有关其环境的信息。在细胞水平上，它们通过信号通路来做到这一点。这种途径依赖于分子之间的可逆结合相互作用，这些分子检测细胞外提示或信号的存在并将其传递到细胞内部。这些相互作用本质上是随机的，因此有噪声。一方面，噪声会导致信号传导通路对不同的刺激产生相同的响应，从而减少通路获取的信息量。另一方面，在随机共振等过程中，噪声可以改善对微弱刺激的检测，从而改善信息的获取。目前尚不清楚决定通路运行的动力学参数是否会导致噪音减少或增加信息的获取。我们分析信号通路使用的可逆结合相互作用的动力学特性如何影响噪声、信号响应和信息获取之间的关系。我们的结果表明，在广泛的生物学敏感参数值下，可逆结合相互作用的噪声动态对于对不同刺激产生不同的反应是必要的。因此，噪声对于信号通路中信息的获取是不可或缺的。我们的观察超越了之前的工作，表明噪声在信号通路中发挥着积极作用，证明了当这些通路获取信息时噪声是必不可少的。