Specificity and reliability in biochemical networks

From Q-bio

Cellular decision-making occurs intracellularly in an environment that is stochastic and crowded with similarly structured proteins. I will propose biochemical mechanisms to achieve specificity and reliability in cellular decisions: an entropic form of ultrasensitivity that generates highly cooperative and specific binding between two proteins; and a biochemical implementation of Bayes's rule that allows the cell to infer from noisy intracellular signals the most probable state of its extracellular environment and to respond to maximize expected benefits.