Telling time with an intrinsically noisy clock

TL;DR

This paper develops a probabilistic framework for understanding how noisy intracellular oscillations transmit information, revealing optimal regulation strategies and resonance effects influenced by physical constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze intrinsically noisy oscillatory systems and identifies how biophysical constraints shape optimal regulatory designs.

Findings

Resonant frequency maximizes information transmission.

Threshold regulation can outperform linear regulation under certain conditions.

Scaling laws for noisy oscillatory systems are derived and verified.

Abstract

Intracellular transmission of information via chemical and transcriptional networks is thwarted by a physical limitation: the finite copy number of the constituent chemical species introduces unavoidable intrinsic noise. Here we provide a method for solving for the complete probabilistic description of intrinsically noisy oscillatory driving. We derive and numerically verify a number of simple scaling laws. Unlike in the case of measuring a static quantity, response to an oscillatory driving can exhibit a resonant frequency which maximizes information transmission. Further, we show that the optimal regulatory design is dependent on the biophysical constraints (i.e., the allowed copy number and response time). The resulting phase diagram illustrates under what conditions threshold regulation outperforms linear regulation.