A formulation of the channel capacity of biochemical signaling cascades

Abstract

Living organisms are non-equilibrium, fluctuating, dynamic systems containing multi-step biological signaling cascades (BSC) with the ability to transduce changes in the concentration of extracellular molecules such as cytokines into changes in gene expression. Here, we derived basic equations that describe the channel capacity and information density of BSC in terms of the average entropy production rate deduced using the fluctuation theorem.