Recently, Ms. Zhang Mengshi, a graduate student from department of biology at SUSTech made a new progress in the final year research project on tunable ultrasensitivity. The work, titled "Tunable ultrasensitivity: functional decoupling and biological insights", has been published in the journal "Scientific Reports", which is an open access journal from the publishers of Nature .

Ms. Zhang was admitted to SUSTech in 2011, who is attracted by our education philosophy. Through four years of general education and high quality of research training, the student could manage to work out some biological problem by programming. Currently, she is pursuing for a doctor's degree in Chinese University of Hong Kong.

 Fig. 1 Examples of ultrasensitivity.  (A) Trachea development of Drosophila.  (B) Stress response of budding yeast.  (C) Our body’s insulin response.

 Fig. 2 Biochemical underpinnings of ultrasensitivity. (A) Reversible covalent modification. (B) Decomposition of sensitivity tuning.

As a remarkable property of nature, ultrasensitivity plays crucial roles in vital biological processes such as development, stress response, insulin response (Fig. 1). The paper revealed that a basic biochemical reaction motif known as reversible covalent modification (Fig. 2) is a source of highly tunable ultrasensitivity; and found that sensitivity tuning can be decomposed into two orthogonal modes. The paper pointed out that, although crosstalk between the two modes always exists, nature solved the problem of decoupling by a simple method, which enables complex regulations in an organism with ease. The only coauthor of this paper is Prof.Wang Guanyu, who is also mentor of Ms.Zhang. The work was supported by  Natural Science Foundation of China, Starting Foundation（Ministry of Education， PRC）,Shenzhen Foundation for Basic Research （JCYJ 20140417105816347）and startup support from SUSTech（FRG-SUSTC1501A-38）.

 Link：http://www.nature.com/articles/srep20345