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Mathematical Models Of Cellular Signaling And Supramolecular Self-Assembly, Pratip Rana

Theses and Dissertations

Synthetic biologists endeavor to predict how the increasing complexity of multi-step signaling cascades impacts the fidelity of molecular signaling, whereby cellular state information is often transmitted with proteins diffusing by a pseudo-one-dimensional stochastic process. We address this problem by using a one-dimensional drift-diffusion model to derive an approximate lower bound on the degree of facilitation needed to achieve single-bit informational efficiency in signaling cascades as a function of their length. We find that a universal curve of the Shannon-Hartley form describes the information transmitted by a signaling chain of arbitrary length and depends upon only a small number of physically …