A Thermodynamic Model for Receptor Clustering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a thermodynamic model to understand receptor clustering in cell signaling, highlighting how cooperative receptor interactions influence signal robustness and proposing a mean-field theoretical framework.

Contribution

It presents a simple phenomenological model for ligand-modulated receptor interactions and analyzes its equilibrium properties, including a first-order transition.

Findings

Receptor clustering exhibits a first-order phase transition.

The model predicts robust signaling responses due to cooperative interactions.

Mean-field theory effectively describes receptor cluster formation.

Abstract

Intracellular signaling often arises from ligand-induced oligomerization of cell surface receptors. This oligomerization or clustering process is fundamentally a cooperative behavior between near-neighbor receptor molecules; the properties of this cooperative process clearly affects the signal transduction. Recent investigations have revealed the molecular basis of receptor-receptor interactions, but a simple theoretical framework for using this data to predict cluster formation has been lacking. Here, we propose a simple, coarse-grained, phenomenological model for ligand-modulated receptor interactions and discuss its equilibrium properties via mean-field theory. The existence of a first-order transition for this model has immediate implications regarding the robustness of the cellular signaling response.