The specification of SBML Level 1 is freely available from http://www.sbml.org/

The chemotaxis network that governs the motion of Escherichia coli has long been studied to gain a general understanding of signal transduction. Although this pathway is composed of just a few components, it exhibits some essential characteristics of biological complexity, such as adaptation and response to environmental signals. In studying intracellular networks, most experiments and mathematical models have assumed that network properties can be inferred from population measurements. However, this approach masks underlying temporal fluctuations of intracellular signalling events. We have inferred fundamental properties of the chemotaxis network from a noise analysis of behavioural variations in individual bacteria. Here we show that certain properties established by population measurements, such as adapted states, are not conserved at the single-cell level: for timescales ranging from seconds to several minutes, the behaviour of non-stimulated cells exhibit temporal variations much larger than the expected statistical fluctuations. We find that the signalling network itself causes this noise and identify the molecular events that produce it. Small changes in the concentration of one key network component suppress temporal behavioural variability, suggesting that such variability is a selected property of this adaptive system.

Combining in vivo FRET with time-varying stimuli, such as steps, ramps, and sinusoids allowed deduction of the molecular mechanisms underlying cellular signal processing.The bacterial chemotaxis pathway can be described as a two-module feedback circuit, the transfer functions of which we have characterized quantitatively by experiment. Model-driven experimental design allowed the use of a single FRET pair for measurements of both transfer functions of the pathway.The adaptation module's transfer function revealed that feedback near steady state is weak, consistent with high sensitivity to shallow gradients, but also strong steady-state fluctuations in pathway output.The measured response to oscillatory stimuli defines the frequency band over which the chemotaxis system can compute time derivatives.

In their natural environment, cells need to extract useful information from complex temporal signals that vary over a wide range of intensities and time scales. Here, we study how such signals are processed by Escherichia coli during chemotaxis by developing a general theoretical model based on receptor adaptation and receptor-receptor cooperativity. Measured responses to various monotonic, oscillatory, and impulsive stimuli are all explained consistently by the underlying adaptation kinetics within this model. For exponential ramp signals, an analytical solution is discovered that reveals a remarkable connection between the dependence of kinase activity on the exponential ramp rate and the receptor methylation rate function. For exponentiated sinewave signals, spectral analysis shows that the chemotaxis pathway acts as a lowpass filter for the derivative of the signal with the cutoff frequency determined by an intrinsic adaptation time scale. For large step stimuli, we find that the recovery time is determined by the constant maximum methylation rate, which provides a natural explanation for the observed recovery time additivity. Our model provides a quantitative system-level description of the chemotaxis signaling pathway and can be used to predict E. coli chemotaxis responses to arbitrary temporal signals. This model of the receptor system reveals the molecular origin of Weber's law in bacterial chemotaxis. We further identify additional constraints required to account for the related observation that the output of this pathway is constant under exponential ramp stimuli, a feature that we call ''logarithmic tracking.'' adaptation kinetics ͉ bacterial chemotaxis ͉ signal processing ͉ Monod-Wyman-Changeux model M ost studies of the kinetics of biological signaling pathways are based on measuring responses to simple controllable stimuli, such as a sudden change of ligand concentration. For example, bacterial chemotaxis is studied by subjecting cells to a step-function change in chemo-effector concentration and measuring the fraction of time that the flagellar motor spins counterclockwise (CCW) or clockwise (CW), for tethered cells (1), or more recently, by measuring the activity of the response regulator (CheY-P) by using FRET (2). Measurements of responses to these step-function stimuli over a range of ambient concentrations have been very useful in revealing the underlying signaling pathway for Escherichia coli chemotaxis (see refs. 3-5 for recent reviews). However, such a simple temporal stimulus is unlikely to be the typical signal encountered by E. coli cells in their natural environment, which changes/fluctuates continuously in time. How does an E. coli cell processes complex time-varying signals to obtain useful information? This is the question we try to address in this article by using a modeling approach tested by comparison with relevant existing experiments. A quantitative model based on microscopic pathway kinetics serves as a natural bridge between the experimentally measured responses to simple si...