Anush Amar Mahajan supervised by Prof. Bhaswar Ghosh received his Master of Science – Dual Degree in Computational Natural Sciences (CNS). Here’s a summary of his research work on Optimizing information transmission through noisy biochemical pathways:

Living organisms need to sense the environment accurately to respond to these stimuli appropriately. The accuracy of estimating the environmental input is severely limited by noise stemming from the inherent stochasticity of the chemical reactions involved in signalling pathways. Cells employ multiple strategies to improve the accuracy by tuning the reaction rates, for instance, amplifying the response, reducing the noise, etc. However, the pathway also consumes energy by incorporating ATP in phosphorylating key signalling proteins involved in the reaction pathways. In many instances, improvements in accuracy elicit extra energetic costs. For example, a higher deactivation rate suppresses the basal pathway activity, effectively amplifying the dynamic range of the response, which leads to improvement in accuracy. Higher deactivation rate also enhances the energy dissipation rate. Here, we employed a theoretical approach based on the thermodynamics of information to explore the role of accuracy and energetic cost in the performance of a Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase signalling system. Our study shows that the accuracy-energy trade-off can explain the optimality of the reaction rates of the reaction pathways rather than accuracy alone. Our analysis elucidates the role of the interplay between accuracy and energetic cost in the evolutionary shaping of the parameter space of signalling pathways.

September 2024