Path mutual information for a class of biochemical reaction networks

Living cells encode and transmit information in the temporal dynamics of signaling molecules. Gaining a quantitative understanding of how intracellular networks process dynamic signals requires measures that capture the interdependence between complete time trajectories of network components. Mutual information provides such a measure but its calculation in the context of stochastic reaction networks is associated with computational challenges. Here we propose a method to calculate the mutual information between complete time-continuous paths of two molecular species that interact with each other through chemical reactions. We demonstrate our approach using three simple case studies.