ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Fundamental trade-offs between information flow in single cells and cellular populations.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 125 citations in OpenAlex.
- Macrophage response specificity to ligand mixtures is improved by signaling pathway antagonism.Molecular systems biology · 2026Article
- Individual yeast cells signal at different levels but each with good precision.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Signal execution modes emerge in biochemical reaction networks calibrated to experimental data.iScience · 2024Article
- Cis-regulatory control of transcriptional timing and noise in response to estrogen.Cell genomics · 2024Article
- Article
- The ability to sense the environment is heterogeneously distributed in cell populations.eLife · 2024Article
- Getting it right: suppression and leveraging of noise in robust decision-making.Quantitative plant biology · 2024Review
- A guide to ERK dynamics, part 2: downstream decoding.The Biochemical journal · 2023Article
- CD3ζ ITAMs enable ligand discrimination and antagonism by inhibiting TCR signaling in response to low-affinity peptides.Nature immunology · 2023Article
- Information-Theoretic Analysis of a Model of CAR-4-1BB-Mediated NFκB Activation.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2023Article
- Article
- An optimized reporter of the transcription factor hypoxia-inducible factor 1α reveals complex HIF-1α activation dynamics in single cells.The Journal of biological chemistry · 2023Article
- Multi-range ERK responses shape the proliferative trajectory of single cells following oncogene induction.Cell reports · 2023Article
- Quantifying stimulus-response specificity to probe the functional state of macrophages.Cell systems · 2023Article
- Vast heterogeneity in cytoplasmic diffusion rates revealed by nanorheology and Doppelgänger simulations.Biophysical journal · 2023Article
- Article
- Epigenetics as a mediator of plasticity in cancer.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Review
- Coordination of MAPK and p53 dynamics in the cellular responses to DNA damage and oxidative stress.Molecular systems biology · 2022Article
- A synthetic synthesis to explore animal evolution and development.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Quantifying information of intracellular signaling: progress with machine learning.Reports on progress in physics. Physical Society (Great Britain) · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Signal transduction networks allow eukaryotic cells to make decisions based on information about intracellular state and the environment. Biochemical noise significantly diminishes the fidelity of signaling: networks examined to date seem to transmit less than 1 bit of information. It is unclear how networks that control critical cell-fate decisions (e.g., cell division and apoptosis) can function with such low levels of information transfer. Here, we use theory, experiments, and numerical analysis to demonstrate an inherent trade-off between the information transferred in individual cells and the information available to control population-level responses. Noise in receptor-mediated apoptosis reduces information transfer to approximately 1 bit at the single-cell level but allows 3-4 bits of information to be transmitted at the population level. For processes such as eukaryotic chemotaxis, in which single cells are the functional unit, we find high levels of information transmission at a single-cell level. Thus, low levels of information transfer are unlikely to represent a physical limit. Instead, we propose that signaling networks exploit noise at the single-cell level to increase population-level information transfer, allowing extracellular ligands, whose levels are also subject to noise, to incrementally regulate phenotypic changes. This is particularly critical for discrete changes in fate (e.g., life vs. death) for which the key variable is the fraction of cells engaged. Our findings provide a framework for rationalizing the high levels of noise in metazoan signaling networks and have implications for the development of drugs that target these networks in the treatment of cancer and other diseases.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.