(594e) Scaffold-Mediated Temporal Control of Cell Signaling Dynamics

The ubiquity of scaffold proteins in cell signaling pathways suggests that scaffold proteins are likely to have many regulatory functions. Here, we present Monte Carlo simulations of a model kinase cascade to investigate how characteristics of signaling cascades are influenced by the presence of scaffold proteins. Our results indicate that scaffold proteins can have a dual-regulatory function by amplifying and attenuating the amplitude of incoming signals depending on the physiological context. We also study how scaffold proteins can alter the temporal characteristics of a signal propagating along a kinase cascade. These simulations suggest that scaffolds can influence signal propagation by changing the duration of signaling as well how the output signal is distributed over time. Such behavior illustrates one of the many control properties that scaffold proteins may confer to a cellular signaling process. It is our hope that these simulations provide a roadmap for future experiments ? several key predictions obtained from our model can be tested with single-molecule technologies.