Efficacy of information transmission in cellular communication

Abstract

Inter and intra-cellular signaling are essential for individual cells to execute various physiological tasks and accurately respond to changes in their environment. Signaling is carried out via diffusible molecules, the transport of which is often aided by active processes that provide directional advection. How diffusion and advection together impact the accuracy of information transmission during cell signaling remains less studied. To this end, we study a one-dimensional model of cell signaling and compute the mutual information (MI) as a measure of information transmission. We find that the efficacy of the information transmission improves with advection only when the system parameters result in Peclet number greater than one. Intriguingly, MI exhibits nontrivial scaling with the Peclet number, characterized by three distinct regimes. We demonstrate that the observed dependence of MI on the transport properties of signaling molecules has important consequences on cellular communication.