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Reliable ligand discrimination in stochastic multistep kinetic proofreading: First passage time vs. product counting strategies

Fig 10

(A) Illustration of discrimination using a dynamic threshold as a function of time T since initial contact. The blue trajectories represent the number of products P with correct substrates. The red trajectories represent that of incorrect substrates. (B) A dynamic-threshold-based discrimination strategy maintains a high channel capacity when the total contact time T is uniformly distributed between 0 and T_max. Filled bars represent the mutual information between input ξ and output X_th with a fixed contact time T and patterned bars represent the mutual information with a uniformly distributed contact time T between 0 and T_max. The green bars indicate the maximal mutual information over all possible contact times T ≤ T_max and all possible static thresholds P_th. The input ξ is assumed to be uniformly distributed on {0, 1}. We assumed , , , τ = 3, and k_p = 1. T_max is set to 10⁶. To filter out noisy transients, we additionally mandate that when the dynamic threshold is smaller than 10 products, no response is initiated.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012183.g010