Search

In circadian rhythm generation, intercellular signaling factors are shown to play a crucial role in both sustaining intrinsic cellular rhythmicity and acquiring collective behaviours across a population of circadian neurons. However, the physical mechanism behind their role remains to be fully understood. In this paper, we propose an indirectly coupled multicellular model for the synchronization of Drosophila circadian oscillators combining both intracellular and intercellular dynamics. By simulating different experimental conditions, we find that such an indirect coupling way can synchronize both heterogeneous self-sustained circadian neurons and heterogeneous mutational damped circadian neurons. Moreover, they can also be entrained to ambient light-dark (LD) cycles depending on intercellular signaling.

Synchronization and clustering of genetic oscillators is a central topic in understanding rhythmicity of living organisms at both molecular and cellular levels. Here, we study two classes of genetic oscillators, i.e., relaxation genetic oscillator and regular genetic oscillator, coupled by attractive or repressive coupling, and show novel synchronization and clustering phenomena. We find that these two classes of coupled oscillators have the different mechanisms of synchronization and clustering in the cases of two kinds of couplings.

Intracellular processes of live organisms, which can be described by sets of biochemical reactions, are inherently stochastic, where the fluctuations in molecule abundance inside the cell play a crucial role in the cellular growth and development. For typical building blocks of biochemical reaction networks （including signal transduction networks and metabolic networks）, this paper first gives a unified formulation and then presents a general mechanism of noise propagation by applying the linear noise approximation theory. The main results show that: there is noise propagation in signaling transduction pathways and the noise intensity satisfies noise sum rule, and there is no noise propagation in metabolic pathways and the distributions of the steady state molecules mutually independent. The analytical results lay a theoretical foundation for understanding the intracellular processes.