To maintain their normal physiology, cells must properly process diverse signals, such as temperature, pH, and nutrient concentration. They must do so in the presence of “noise”, or stochasticity in gene expression and cellular processes. A better understanding of how cellular networks encode, transmit, and decode information will impact broad areas spanning biology and engineering. By modeling a linear gene circuit, we demonstrate fundamental differences in the impact of cellular noise on transmission of amplitude or frequency signals. We find that transmission of amplitude signals is “noisy yet resilient”: cellular noise always cause significant distortion to the signal, but given enough response time and a sufficiently low fidelity requirement, the signals can always be transmitted to downstream cellular networks. In contrast, transmission of frequency signals has “all-or-none” characteristics, limited by a critical frequency. Signals with lower frequencies are transmitted with complete fidelity, but those with higher frequencies are severely corrupted or completely lost. We further explored how circuit parameters and regulatory functions would impact characteristics of signal transmission. In each case, there is a trade-off between fidelity, speed, and cost of signal transmission. These characteristics may determine the potential biological niches of signal coding strategies.

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