Signal Processing in Single Cells

摘要

Consider a high-tech version of the "telephone game" in which you and a group of your friends attempt to transmit a message via your cell phones. One person in the chain has a phone from the 1990s, which is very noisy. Another person is standing in the middle of Times Square in New York City. It would not be surprising if the message received by the person at the end of the chain, or cascade, were corrupted as a result of noise intrinsic to the old phone and the noise arising from the Times Square environment. In this issue, Rosenfeld et al. on page 1962 (7) and Pedraza and van Oudenaarden on page 1965 (2) investigate a living-cell version of this game by exploring how signals are transmitted through gene cascades in noisy cellular environments.