Figure 8. NF-κB behaves as a damped oscillator that can synchronize to time-varying external stimuli to produce functionally related transcriptional outputs.
(A) The NF-κB system is able to provide different responses to different inputs, from constant (left) to time-varying ones (right). (B) Our cells show damped oscillations to a constant stimulus (left, green lines), although for other cell types sustained oscillations might be possible (magenta line). Damped oscillations can adapt to timevarying inputs (right) and give rise to synchronous oscillations. (C) These synchronous oscillations produce different patterns of gene expression, from oscillating (left, orange lines) to slowly increasing (right, blue lines) and intermediate dynamics (pink lines, centre). We find that each kind of dynamics is typical for genes involved in different cellular functions.