Yi Qizhi, Zhou Tianshou
School of Mathematics and Computational Science, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2011 May;83(5 Pt 1):051907. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.83.051907. Epub 2011 May 9.
Traditionally, the main role of cell-to-cell communication was thought of as synchronizing a population of cells, thereby coordinating cellular behavior. Here we show that cell density, which quantifies cellular communication, can induce multistability and multirhythmicity in a synthetic multicellular system, where individual oscillators are a combination of repressillator and hysteresis-based oscillators and are coupled through a quorum-sensing mechanism. Specifically, for moderately small cell densities, the coupled system can exhibit multistability including stable homogenous and inhomogeneous steady states. For moderately large cell densities, it has the potential to generate multirhythmicity including multimode oscillations such as an in-phase periodic solution, antiphase periodic solution, asymmetric periodic solution, mixed-mode oscillations, coexistence of periodic orbits of several different modes, and bursting oscillations such as periodic bursting, torus quasiperiodic bursting, and chaotic bursting. Such versatility of cell-to-cell communication would be beneficial for cells or organisms to live in diversely changeable environments.
传统上，细胞间通讯的主要作用被认为是使一群细胞同步，从而协调细胞行为。在此我们表明，量化细胞通讯的细胞密度能够在一个合成多细胞系统中诱导多稳态和多节律性，其中单个振荡器是阻遏振荡子和基于滞后的振荡器的组合，并通过群体感应机制耦合。具体而言，对于适度小的细胞密度，耦合系统可表现出多稳态，包括稳定的均匀和非均匀稳态。对于适度大的细胞密度，它有可能产生多节律性，包括多模式振荡，如同步周期解、反相周期解、非对称周期解、混合模式振荡、几种不同模式的周期轨道共存，以及爆发振荡，如周期性爆发、环面准周期性爆发和混沌爆发。细胞间通讯的这种多功能性将有利于细胞或生物体生活在多变的环境中。
