Cooperativity, sensitivity and noise in biochemical signaling

Cooperative interactions among the binding of multiple signaling molecules is a common mechanism for enhancing the sensitivity of biological signaling systems. It is widely assumed that this increase in sensitivity of the mean response implies the ability to detect smaller signals. We show that, quite generally, there is a component of the noise in such systems that can be traced to the random arrival of the signaling molecules at their receptor sites, and this diffusive noise is not reduced by cooperativity. Cooperativity makes it easier for real systems to reach this physical limit, but cannot reduce the limit itself.