Synergy and Redundancy in a Signaling Cascade with Different Feedback Mechanisms

Feedback plays an important role in various biological signal transmission systems. In this paper, a signaling cascade system (including three layers:input (S), intermediate (V), output (X) components) is employed to study the fluctuations and net synergy in information transmission, in which the V component is regulated by itself or the X component, and each feedback on V is either positive or negative. The Fano factor, the net synergy, and the signalto-noise ratio (SNR) of signaling cascade with the four possible feedback types are theoretically derived by using linear noise approximation of the master equation, and the ability of information transmission through the signaling cascade is characterized by using the partial information decomposition of information theory. It is found that the signaling cascade exhibits different responses to the four feedback mechanisms, which depend on the relationships between degradation rates of components. Our results not only clarify the dependence of the Fano factor, net synergy, and SNR on the feedback regulations with the varying of degradation rates of components, but also imply that living cells could utilize different feedback mechanisms to adapt to the external fluctuating environments.