Koseska, A;
Zaikin, A;
Kurths, J;
Garcia-Ojalvo, J;
(2009)
Timing Cellular Decision Making Under Noise via Cell-Cell Communication.
PLOS ONE
, 4
(3)
, Article e4872. 10.1371/journal.pone.0004872.
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Abstract
Many cellular processes require decision making mechanisms, which must act reliably even in the unavoidable presence of substantial amounts of noise. However, the multistable genetic switches that underlie most decision-making processes are dominated by fluctuations that can induce random jumps between alternative cellular states. Here we show, via theoretical modeling of a population of noise-driven bistable genetic switches, that reliable timing of decision-making processes can be accomplished for large enough population sizes, as long as cells are globally coupled by chemical means. In the light of these results, we conjecture that cell proliferation, in the presence of cell-cell communication, could provide a mechanism for reliable decision making in the presence of noise, by triggering cellular transitions only when the whole cell population reaches a certain size. In other words, the summation performed by the cell population would average out the noise and reduce its detrimental impact.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Timing Cellular Decision Making Under Noise via Cell-Cell Communication |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0004872 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004872 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2009 Koseska et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. A.K. and J.K. acknowledge the GoFORSYS project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Grant Nr. 0313924, A.Z. acknowledges financial support from VW-foundation and CESCA-CEPBA through European ACCESS programm, J.G.O. from the Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia (Spain, project FIS2006-11452), the European Commission (GABA project), and the I3 program of the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (Spain), and J.K. from the EU through the Network of Excellence BioSim, Contract No. LSHB-CT-2004-005137. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL EGA Institute for Womens Health UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL EGA Institute for Womens Health > Womens Cancer |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/116904 |
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