Effects of dose-response relationships on cellular information transmission

Linear transfer functions typically improve signaling fidelity in multi-step cellular signaling systems across Gaussian, gamma, constant coefficient of variation, and binomial noise distributions.

• Why it matters: Cells achieve high-precision information transmission despite noisy biochemical reactions, but the design rules linking dose-response tuning to signaling fidelity remain unclear.
• What they did: The authors used analytic and numerical methods to quantify maximum transmitted information in single-step and multi-step signaling systems under Gaussian, gamma, constant coefficient of variation, and binomial noise.
• The result: Low baselines, large dynamic ranges, and dose-response shapes matched to input distributions increase information; switchlike transfer functions reach at most one bit and are robust only to low noise.