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Updated: Feb 13, 2026

Mimicking the Function of Signaling Proteins: Toward Artificial Signal Transduction Therapy
Published on: September 29, 2016
Modeling evolution of crosstalk in noisy signal transduction networks
Ammar Tareen1, Ned S Wingreen2, Ranjan Mukhopadhyay1
1Department of Physics, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts 01610, USA.
Abstract:
Signal transduction networks can form highly interconnected systems within cells due to crosstalk between constituent pathways. To better understand the evolutionary design principles underlying such networks, we study the evolution of crosstalk for two parallel signaling pathways that arise via gene duplication. We use a sequence-based evolutionary algorithm and evolve the network based on two physically motivated fitness functions related to information transmission. We find that one fitness function leads to a high degree of crosstalk while the other leads to pathway specificity. Our results offer insights on the relationship between network architecture and information transmission for noisy biomolecular networks.
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