ArticleCell systems2022
Ligand-receptor promiscuity enables cellular addressing.
Article in Cell systems, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed.
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- TGF-β/BMP signaling in skeletal biology: molecular mechanisms, regulatory networks, and therapeutic implications in development, regeneration, and disease.Bone research · 2026Review
- Advances in research on the effects of bile acids and their receptors on intestinal function.Frontiers in nutrition · 2026Review
- Trainable computation in molecular networks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Receptor dimerization enables ligand discrimination through tunable response heterogeneity.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
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- Noise-driven morphogenesis independent of transcriptional regulatory programs.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Limits on the computational expressivity of non-equilibrium biophysical processes.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Acute regulation of murine adipose tissue lipolysis and insulin resistance by the TGFβ superfamily protein GDF3.Nature communications · 2025Article
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- Covalent Dynamic DNA Networks to Translate Multiple Inputs into Programmable Outputs.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- Feasibility of Ex Vivo Ligandomics.Biomolecules · 2025Article
- Linking signaling dynamics and cell fate decisions through single-cell imaging: evidence and challenges.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2025Review
- Engineering Sequestration-Based Biomolecular Classifiers with Shared Resources.ACS synthetic biology · 2024Article
- Principles of Computation by Competitive Protein Dimerization Networks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
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9 authors.
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Abstract
In multicellular organisms, secreted ligands selectively activate, or "address," specific target cell populations to control cell fate decision-making and other processes. Key cell-cell communication pathways use multiple promiscuously interacting ligands and receptors, provoking the question of how addressing specificity can emerge from molecular promiscuity. To investigate this issue, we developed a general mathematical modeling framework based on the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) pathway architecture. We find that promiscuously interacting ligand-receptor systems allow a small number of ligands, acting in combinations, to address a larger number of individual cell types, defined by their receptor expression profiles. Promiscuous systems outperform seemingly more specific one-to-one signaling architectures in addressing capability. Combinatorial addressing extends to groups of cell types, is robust to receptor expression noise, grows more powerful with increases in the number of receptor variants, and is maximized by specific biochemical parameter relationships. Together, these results identify design principles governing cellular addressing by ligand combinations.
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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.