Intrinsic noise, dissipation cost, and robustness of cellular networks: the underlying energy landscape of MAPK signal transduction.

ABSTRACT: We develop a probabilistic method for analyzing global features of a cellular network under intrinsic statistical fluctuations, which is important when there are finite numbers of molecules. By making a self-consistent mean field approximation of splitting the variables in order to reduce the large number of degrees of freedom, which is reasonable for a not very strongly interacting network, we discovered that the underlying energy landscape of the mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) signal transduction network (with experimentally measured or inferred parameters such as chemical reaction rate coefficients in the network) is funneled toward a global minimum characterized by the nonequilibrium steady-state fixed point of the system at the end of the signal transduction process. For th

SUBMITTER: Lapidus S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2329678 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature