Negative feedback makes cells ’sensitive’

New research has shown that negative feedback loops in cell signalling systems can be essential for a cell's ability to perceive the strength of a growth stimulus. Cells lacking the feedback loop became insensitive to the level of the stimulus in a manner similar to a cancerous cell displaying unrestrained growth. Living cells need to sense changes in their environment reliably in order to make appropriate decisions. The biomolecular machinery they use to perform these tasks is surprisingly noisy. Combining automated cell imaging and mathematical analysis, the team from the University of Bristol explored what happens when the signalling system in the cell has a background level of activation even when no stimulus is present, similar to a light bulb that glows even when its switch is off. The collaborative study, carried out by the groups of Dr Clive Bowsher in the School of Mathematics and Professor Craig McArdle in the School of Clinical Sciences , is published online this week in PNAS . Using information theory and statistics to analyse the data from images of hundreds of thousands of individual cells, the team showed that mutant cells lacking the negative feedback loop could not detect the level of growth factor.