Detection of sustained signals and its relation to coherent feedforward loops
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Many studies have shown that cells use temporal dynamics of signaling molecules to encode information. One particular class of temporal dynamics is sustained and transient signals, i.e. signals of long and short durations respectively. This paper formulates a detection problem for distinguishing sustained signals from transient ones. The solution of the detection problem is to compute the likelihood ratio of observing a sustained signal to a transient signal. We show that, if the logarithm of this likelihood ratio is positive (i.e. when the signal is likely to be sustained), then this log-likelihood ratio can be approximately computed by a coherent feedforward loop. Although the capability of coherent feedforward loops to discriminate sustained signals is known, its statistical information processing interpretation has not been pointed out before.
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