ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Spatial partitioning improves the reliability of biochemical signaling.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Uncovering the Lipid Interface in Neurotransmission: Single Molecule Measurements of Neurotransmitters Interacting with Membranes Reveal Species Dependent Membrane Binding.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Compartmental exchange regulates steady states and stochastic switching of a phosphorylation network.Biophysical journal · 2024Article
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- Optimal ligand discrimination by asymmetric dimerization and turnover of interferon receptors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Concentration sensing in crowded environments.Biophysical journal · 2021Article
- RAS Nanoclusters: Dynamic Signaling Platforms Amenable to Therapeutic Intervention.Biomolecules · 2021Review
- Rhodopsin Oligomerization and Aggregation.The Journal of membrane biology · 2019Review
- NMR- and MD simulation-based structural characterization of the membrane-associating FATC domain of ataxia telangiectasia mutated.The Journal of biological chemistry · 2019Article
- REM1.3's phospho-status defines its plasma membrane nanodomain organization and activity in restricting PVX cell-to-cell movement.PLoS pathogens · 2018Article
- Target of rapamycin FATC domain as a general membrane anchor: The FKBP-12 like domain of FKBP38 as a case study.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2018Article
- Determining the Roles of Inositol Trisphosphate Receptors in Neurodegeneration: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Complex Topic.Molecular neurobiology · 2017Review
- Structural basis for plant plasma membrane protein dynamics and organization into functional nanodomains.eLife · 2017Article
- Optimal Compartmentalization Strategies for Metabolic Microcompartments.Biophysical journal · 2017Article
- Cooperative Clustering Digitizes Biochemical Signaling and Enhances its Fidelity.Biophysical journal · 2016Article
- Noise Expands the Response Range of the Bacillus subtilis Competence Circuit.PLoS computational biology · 2016Article
- Regulation of the Target of Rapamycin and Other Phosphatidylinositol 3-Kinase-Related Kinases by Membrane Targeting.Membranes · 2015Review
- Particle Simulation of Oxidation Induced Band 3 Clustering in Human Erythrocytes.PLoS computational biology · 2015Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Spatial heterogeneity is a hallmark of living systems, even at the molecular scale in individual cells. A key example is the partitioning of membrane-bound proteins via lipid domain formation or cytoskeleton-induced corralling. However, the impact of this spatial heterogeneity on biochemical signaling processes is poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate that partitioning improves the reliability of biochemical signaling. We exactly solve a stochastic model describing a ubiquitous motif in membrane signaling. The solution reveals that partitioning improves signaling reliability via two effects: it moderates the nonlinearity of the switching response, and it reduces noise in the response by suppressing correlations between molecules. An optimal partition size arises from a trade-off between minimizing the number of proteins per partition to improve signaling reliability and ensuring sufficient proteins per partition to maintain signal propagation. The predicted optimal partition size agrees quantitatively with experimentally observed systems. These results persist in spatial simulations with explicit diffusion barriers. Our findings suggest that molecular partitioning is not merely a consequence of the complexity of cellular substructures, but also plays an important functional role in cell signaling.
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