Distributing tasks via multiple input pathways increases cellular survival in stress

• DOI: 10.7554/elife.21415
• Publication Date: 2017-05-17T12:00:13Z
• Authors: Alejandro A Granados; Matthew M Crane; Luis F Montano-Gu...; Reiko J Tanaka; Margaritis Voliotis; Peter S Swain
• Keywords: Signalling; Signalling pathways

Improving in one aspect of a task can undermine performance another, but how such opposing demands play out single cells and impact on fitness is mostly unknown. Here we study budding yeast dynamic environments hyperosmotic stress show the corresponding signalling network increases cellular survival both by assigning requirements high response speed accuracy to two separate input pathways having these interact converge Hog1, p38 MAP kinase. Cells with only less accurate, reflex-like pathway are fitter sudden stress, whereas slow, more accurate increasing fluctuating stress. Our results demonstrate that vulnerable trade-offs performance, be mitigated tasks different subnetworks. Such division labour could function broadly within signal transduction.