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标题：Emergent memory in cell signaling: Persistent adaptive dynamics in cascades can arise from the diversity of relaxation time-scales
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作者：Tanmay Mitra ; Shakti N. Menon ; Sitabhra Sinha 等
期刊名称：Scientific Reports
电子版ISSN：2045-2322
出版年度：2018
卷号：8
期号：1
页码：13230
DOI：10.1038/s41598-018-31626-9
语种：English
出版社：Springer Nature
摘要：The mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling cascade, an evolutionarily conserved motif present in all eukaryotic cells, is involved in coordinating crucial cellular functions. While the asymptotic dynamical behavior of the pathway stimulated by a time-invariant signal is relatively well-understood, we show using a computational model that it exhibits a rich repertoire of transient adaptive responses to changes in stimuli. When the signal is switched on, the response is characterized by long-lived modulations in frequency as well as amplitude. On withdrawing the stimulus, the activity decays over long timescales, exhibiting reverberations characterized by repeated spiking in the activated MAPK concentration. The long-term persistence of such post-stimulus activity suggests that the cascade retains memory of the signal for a significant duration following its removal. The molecular mechanism underlying the reverberatory activity is related to the existence of distinct relaxation rates for the different cascade components. This results in the imbalance of fluxes between different layers of the cascade, with the reuse of activated kinases as enzymes when they are released from sequestration in complexes. The persistent adaptive response, indicative of a cellular “short-term” memory, suggests that this ubiquitous signaling pathway plays an even more central role in information processing by eukaryotic cells.