Quantification of Information Flow by Dual Reporter System and Its Application to Bacterial Chemotaxis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method using dual reporter systems to quantify information flow in cellular signaling, specifically applied to bacterial chemotaxis, bypassing the need to measure input distributions and enabling broader biological insights.

Contribution

The authors develop a mutual information estimator that leverages dual reporters to simplify measurement requirements in cellular signaling analysis.

Findings

Validated the method on bacterial chemotaxis pathway

Compared measured information flow with theoretical bounds

Demonstrated biological relevance of the information quantification

Abstract

Mutual information is a theoretically grounded metric for quantifying cellular signaling pathways. However, its measurement demands characterization of both input and output distributions, limiting practical applications. Here, we present alternative method that alleviates this requirement using dual reporter systems. By extending extrinsic-intrinsic noise analysis, we derive a mutual information estimator that eliminates the need to measure input distribution. We demonstrate our method by analyzing the bacterial chemotactic pathway, regarding multiple flagellar motors as natural dual reporters. We show the biological relevance of the measured information flow by comparing it with theoretical bounds on sensory information. This framework opens new possibilities for quantifying information flow in cellular signaling pathways.