Title: A signalling cascade balances energetic cost versus accuracy of information transmission

Speaker: Dr. Bhaswar Ghosh, International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad

Abstract: Cellular processes are inherently noisy, and the selection for accurate responses in presence of noise has likely shaped signalling networks. Here we investigate the trade-off between improved accuracy of information transmission and its energetic cost for a eukaryotic MAPK signalling cascade. Our analysis suggests that the negative transcriptional feedbacks in the pheromone pathway of budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae maximizes the information per unit energetic cost, rather than the information transmission capacity itself. We further demonstrate that the energy dissipation within the signalling cascade has a measurable effect on growth fitness, thus being subject to evolutionary selection. We conclude that considering the energetic cost of information processing, well established in physics and engineering, may offer a general framework to understand the regulatory design of cellular signalling systems.