Information storage and transfer in autoregulated cascades

Abstract We present a Gaussian framework to investigate the role of autoregulation in information storage and transfer in one-step cascades by considering activation and inhibition of the autoregulated transcription factor and the output gene it drives. With an increasing autoregulatory synthesis rate of the transcription factor, the information stored by the output gene product and the information transferred from the transcription factor to the output increase when both biochemical species are activated or inhibited. If they are regulated differently, an increasing autoregulatory synthesis rate decreases information storage and transfer. An autoactivated transcription factor activating the output is the best architecture for storing and transferring information. Interestingly, this network is also the noisiest in the family of autoregulated cascades. To unravel this nontrivial information-noise correspondence, we provide analytical results that tie correlated and uncorrelated noise factors to information storage and transfer, respectively.