Back

On the relationship between concentration buffering and noise reduction in phase separating systems

Zechner, C.; Julicher, F.

2024-02-26 biophysics
10.1101/2024.02.26.579621 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Biomolecular condensates have been proposed to buffer intracellular concentrations and reduce noise. Recent results demonstrate that concentrations need not be buffered in multicomponent systems, leading to a non-constant saturation concentration ( csat ) when individual components are varied. Simplified equilibrium considerations suggest that noise reduction might be closely related to concentration buffering and that a fixed saturation concentration is required for noise reduction to be effective. Here we present a theoretical analysis to demonstrate that these suggestions do not apply to mesoscopic fluctuating systems. We show that concentration buffering and noise reduction are distinct concepts, which cannot be used interchangeably. We further demonstrate that concentration buffering - and a constant csat - are neither necessary nor sufficient for noise reduction to be effective. Clarity about these concepts is important for studying the role of condensates in controlling cellular noise and for the interpretation of concentration relationships in cells.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.