Characterizing the non-monotonic behavior of mutual information along biochemical reaction cascades

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Hauptverfasser: Fan, Raymond, Hilfinger, Andreas
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Fan, Raymond
Hilfinger, Andreas
author_facet Fan, Raymond
Hilfinger, Andreas
contents Cells sense environmental signals and transmit information intracellularly through changes in the abundance of molecular components. Such molecular abundances can be measured in single cells and exhibit significant heterogeneity in clonal populations even in identical environments. Experimentally observed joint probability distributions can then be used to quantify the covariability and mutual information between molecular abundances along signaling cascades. However, because stationary state abundances along stochastic biochemical reaction cascades are not conditionally independent, their mutual information is not constrained by the data processing inequality. Here, we report the conditions under which the mutual information between stationary state abundances increases along a cascade of biochemical reactions. This non-monotonic behavior can be intuitively understood in terms of noise propagation and time-averaging stochastic fluctuations that are short-lived compared to an extrinsic signal. Our results re-emphasize that mutual information measurements of stationary state distributions of cellular components may be of limited utility for characterizing cellular signaling processes because they do not measure information transfer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_10162
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Characterizing the non-monotonic behavior of mutual information along biochemical reaction cascades
Fan, Raymond
Hilfinger, Andreas
Quantitative Methods
Cells sense environmental signals and transmit information intracellularly through changes in the abundance of molecular components. Such molecular abundances can be measured in single cells and exhibit significant heterogeneity in clonal populations even in identical environments. Experimentally observed joint probability distributions can then be used to quantify the covariability and mutual information between molecular abundances along signaling cascades. However, because stationary state abundances along stochastic biochemical reaction cascades are not conditionally independent, their mutual information is not constrained by the data processing inequality. Here, we report the conditions under which the mutual information between stationary state abundances increases along a cascade of biochemical reactions. This non-monotonic behavior can be intuitively understood in terms of noise propagation and time-averaging stochastic fluctuations that are short-lived compared to an extrinsic signal. Our results re-emphasize that mutual information measurements of stationary state distributions of cellular components may be of limited utility for characterizing cellular signaling processes because they do not measure information transfer.
title Characterizing the non-monotonic behavior of mutual information along biochemical reaction cascades
topic Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10162