AUTHOR=Bressloff Paul, Karamched Bhargav TITLE=A frequency-dependent decoding mechanism for axonal length sensing JOURNAL=Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience VOLUME=9 YEAR=2015 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2015.00281 DOI=10.3389/fncel.2015.00281 ISSN=1662-5102 ABSTRACT=We have recently developed a mathematical model of axonal length sensing in which a system of delay differential equations describe a chemical signaling network. We showed that chemical oscillations emerge due to delayed negative feedback via a Hopf bifurcation, resulting in a frequency that is a monotonically decreasing function of axonal length. In this paper, we explore how frequency-encoding of axonal length can be decoded by a frequency-modulated gene network. If the protein output were thresholded, then this could provide a mechanism for axonal length control. We analyze the robustness of such a mechanism in the presence of intrinsic noise due to finite copy numbers within the gene network.