General principles of binding between cell surface receptors and multi-specific ligands: A computational study
Fig 4
We changed the relative concentrations of two receptors on cell surfaces.
The second scenario was applied, in which the total number of receptor A was fixed and the total number of receptor C was changed from 0 to 100. We first fixed both AB and CD binding affinities (a). The figure shows that higher surface densities of receptors C lead to more interactions between receptor A and its ligand. In the second test (b), we changed the affinity between receptor A and ligand B from -7kT to -11kT. The x index of the figure is the number of receptors C on cell surfaces. The relative increment of AB interactions between 0 and a given concentration of receptors C is recorded in the y axis. The simulation results of the figure demonstrate that the ligands with reduced affinity have higher specificity to distinguish different types of cells based on the concentrations of their receptors.