Implementation Considerations, Not Topological Differences, Are the Main Determinants of Noise Suppression Properties in Feedback and Incoherent Feedforward Circuits

摘要

Author Summary Essential to the survival of biological organisms is their ability to decipher and respond accordingly to stress scenarios presented by a changing and often unpredictable environment. Cellular noise, present due to the inherently random nature of both the external and internal environments, can obfuscate and corrupt the information found in the environmental cues, thus necessitating the development of mechanisms capable of repressing the noise and recovering the true information. Understanding these noise suppressing mechanisms is an important step toward the general understanding of adaptation and survival in biology. Here we present ideas that have broad implications for the understanding of the role and prevalence of two such mechanisms: the feedback and incoherent feedforward motifs. Using computational and analytical tools commonly employed in engineering applications, we characterize the performance and limitations of these two motifs, as well as establish their equivalence in dealing this several types of noise. We show that the effectiveness and preference of one motif over the other lies mostly in the practical implementation details and not in their structural properties.