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Fig. 1. Information and signal transduction. The term `signal transduction',
as used in cell biology, initially arose as an analogy with the transmission
of information in telecommunications
(Rodbell, 1995). In
telecommunications, a channel is used to transduce information from a source
to a specific destination. A transmitter places the information into the
channel and a receiver picks it up and delivers it to the destination. In
biological systems, the signal is the source, and the targets the destination.
The signal transduction system is the channel that is accessed through a
receptor. The system's effector acts as the receiver and delivers the signal
to the targets. In telecommunications, noise is an inherent property of the
transduction process. Noise exists in the source and destination, but most
significantly in the channel, which has to pass the information between the
transmitter and the receiver. It is highly unlikely that biological signal
transduction is immune to noise.
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