Affiliation:
1. Capital Normal University, China
Abstract
Signals in transduction cascades are widely exposed to stochastic influences. In this work, we investigate the effects of agonist release noises on calcium signaling. Besides the usually considered “amplitude noise”, the case of “frequency noise” is also discussed. Simulation results show that the transduction cascades may amplify these noises when its intensity is bigger than certain critical value. The amplified noise show constructive effect to maintain the calcium signaling in critical signal-free cases. Moreover, the signal is more sensitive to the “frequency noise” than to the “amplitude noise”. This suggests frequency fluctuations in signaling cascades may have greater influence than the amplitude ones, which is an important finding for signal transduction in complex pathways. Since biological systems are inherently stochastic, this work demonstrates how the calcium system takes advantage of the environmental fluctuations to maintain signaling, and therefore provide effective, sensitive signal communication.