# Information propagation in time through allosteric signaling

## TL;DR

This paper explores how allosteric regulation affects information transfer in enzyme signaling, revealing that down-regulation can enhance information flow contrary to traditional expectations.

## Contribution

It demonstrates that allosteric regulation can increase information transmission in signaling pathways, challenging the assumption that higher enzyme activity always correlates with more information.

## Key findings

- Mutual information depends on transition kinetics between allosteric states.
- Down-regulation can increase information transfer to downstream proteins.
- Allosteric effects can be used to modulate signaling information flow.

## Abstract

Naively, one expects the information communicated by an enzyme downstream within a signaling network, in which the enzyme is embedded, to grow monotonically with the enzyme's rate of product formation. However, here we observe that this does not necessarily hold true for allosterically regulated enzymes, often observed in signaling networks. In particular, we find that the mutual information between the catalytic sites of an allosterically regulated enzyme and a receiver protein downstream in the signaling pathway depends on the transition kinetics between the different allosterically regulated states of the enzyme and their respective rates of product formation. Surprisingly, our work implies that allosteric down-regulation of an enzyme's rate of product formation may not only be used as a way to silence itself, as one would normally expect. Rather, down-regulation may also be used to increase the information communicated by this enzyme to a receiver protein downstream in a signaling pathway.