No Arabic abstract
We report the first study of a network of connected enzyme-catalyzed reactions, with added chemical and enzymatic processes that incorporate the recently developed biochemical filtering steps into the functioning of this biocatalytic cascade. New theoretical expressions are derived to allow simple, few-parameter modeling of network components concatenated in such cascades, both with and without filtering. The derived expressions are tested against experimental data obtained for the realized networks responses, measured optically, to variations of its input chemicals concentrations with and without filtering processes. We also describe how the present modeling approach captures and explains several observations and features identified in earlier studies of enzymatic processes when they were considered as potential network components for multi-step information/signal processing systems.
We describe modeling approaches to a network of connected enzyme-catalyzed reactions, with added (bio)chemical processes that introduce biochemical filtering steps into the functioning of such a biocatalytic cascade. Theoretical expressions are derived that allow simple, few-parameter modeling of processes concatenated in such cascades, both with and without filtering. The modeling approach captures and explains features identified in earlier studies of enzymatic processes considered as potential network components for multi-step information/signal processing systems.
The hyperbolic dependence of catalytic rate on substrate concentration is a classical result in enzyme kinetics, quantified by the celebrated Michaelis-Menten equation. The ubiquity of this relation in diverse chemical and biological contexts has recently been rationalized by a graph-theoretic analysis of deterministic reaction networks. Experiments, however, have revealed that molecular noise - intrinsic stochasticity at the molecular scale - leads to significant deviations from classical results and to unexpected effects like molecular memory, i.e., the breakdown of statistical independence between turnover events. Here we show, through a new method of analysis, that memory and non-hyperbolicity have a common source in an initial, and observably long, transient peculiar to stochastic reaction networks of multiple enzymes. Networks of single enzymes do not admit such transients. The transient yields, asymptotically, to a steady-state in which memory vanishes and hyperbolicity is recovered. We propose new statistical measures, defined in terms of turnover times, to distinguish between the transient and steady states and apply these to experimental data from a landmark experiment that first observed molecular memory in a single enzyme with multiple binding sites. Our study shows that catalysis at the molecular level with more than one enzyme always contains a non-classical regime and provides insight on how the classical limit is attained.
Information transmission in biological signaling circuits has often been described using the metaphor of a noise filter. Cellular systems need accurate, real-time data about their environmental conditions, but the biochemical reaction networks that propagate, amplify, and process signals work with noisy representations of that data. Biology must implement strategies that not only filter the noise, but also predict the current state of the environment based on information delayed due to the finite speed of chemical signaling. The idea of a biochemical noise filter is actually more than just a metaphor: we describe recent work that has made an explicit mathematical connection between signaling fidelity in cellular circuits and the classic theories of optimal noise filtering and prediction that began with Wiener, Kolmogorov, Shannon, and Bode. This theoretical framework provides a versatile tool, allowing us to derive analytical bounds on the maximum mutual information between the environmental signal and the real-time estimate constructed by the system. It helps us understand how the structure of a biological network, and the response times of its components, influences the accuracy of that estimate. The theory also provides insights into how evolution may have tuned enzyme kinetic parameters and populations to optimize information transfer.
We report a study of a system which involves an enzymatic cascade realizing an AND logic gate, with an added photochemical processing of the output allowing to make the gates response sigmoid in both inputs. New functional forms are developed for quantifying the kinetics of such systems, specifically designed to model their response in terms of signal and information processing. These theoretical expressions are tested for the studied system, which also allows us to consider aspects of biochemical information processing such as noise transmission properties and control of timing of the chemical and physical steps.
Motivation: The design of enzymes is as challenging as it is consequential for making chemical synthesis in medical and industrial applications more efficient, cost-effective and environmentally friendly. While several aspects of this complex problem are computationally assisted, the drafting of catalytic mechanisms, i.e. the specification of the chemical steps-and hence intermediate states-that the enzyme is meant to implement, is largely left to human expertise. The ability to capture specific chemistries of multi-step catalysis in a fashion that enables its computational construction and design is therefore highly desirable and would equally impact the elucidation of existing enzymatic reactions whose mechanisms are unknown. Results: We use the mathematical framework of graph transformation to express the distinction between rules and reactions in chemistry. We derive about 1000 rules for amino acid side chain chemistry from the M-CSA database, a curated repository of enzymatic mechanisms. Using graph transformation we are able to propose hundreds of hypothetical catalytic mechanisms for a large number of unrelated reactions in the Rhea database. We analyze these mechanisms to find that they combine in chemically sound fashion individual steps from a variety of known multi-step mechanisms, showing that plausible novel mechanisms for catalysis can be constructed computationally.