Allostery Beyond Amplification: Temporal Regulation of Signaling Information

TL;DR

This paper reveals that allostery not only modulates enzyme activity but also controls the timing and duration of information transmission in signaling pathways, enabling dynamic regulation without altering metabolic pathways.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic and information-theoretic framework to quantify how allostery influences temporal aspects of signaling beyond steady-state effects.

Findings

Allostery regulates timing and duration of information flow.

Temporal regulation enables distinct signaling outcomes.

Allostery provides a mechanism for signaling specificity without metabolic changes.

Abstract

Allostery is a fundamental mechanism of protein regulation and is commonly interpreted as modulating enzymatic activity or product abundance. Here we show that this view is incomplete. Using a stochastic model of allosteric regulation combined with an information-theoretic analysis, we quantify the mutual information between an enzyme's regulatory state and the states of downstream signaling components. Beyond controlling steady-state production levels, allostery also regulates the timing and duration over which information is transmitted. By tuning the temporal operating regime of signaling pathways, allosteric regulation enables distinct dynamical outcomes from identical molecular components, providing a physical mechanism for temporal information flow, signaling specificity, and coordination without changes in metabolic pathways.