Ramon Grima: "Processing of external noise by biochemical networks: the role of activation-inhibition interactions"

Ramon Grima
School of Biological Sciences, The University of Edinburgh

Processing of external noise by biochemical networks: the role of activation-inhibition interactions

In this talk I will discuss the results of a recent theory that we developed to elucidate the propagation of external noise through intracellular biochemical networks. We show that networks in which the chemical interactions are predominantly of the mutual-activation or mutual-inhibition type act as low-pass filters and hence find use as noise-attenuators. In contrast, those networks dominated by activation-inhibition interactions are found to act as low-pass filters when the strength of the interactions are below a certain threshold and as band-pass filters otherwise and are hence useful for noise exploitation purposes.