Noisy Oscillations in the Actin Cytoskeleton of Chemotactic Amoeba
- Biological systems with their complex biochemical networks are known to be intrinsically noisy. Here we investigate the dynamics of actin polymerization of amoeboid cells, which are close to the onset of oscillations. We show that the large phenotypic variability in the polymerization dynamics can be accurately captured by a generic nonlinear oscillator model in the presence of noise. We determine the relative role of the noise with a single dimensionless, experimentally accessible parameter, thus providing a quantitative description of the variability in a population of cells. Our approach, which rests on a generic description of a system close to a Hopf bifurcation and includes the effect of noise, can characterize the dynamics of a large class of noisy systems close to an oscillatory instability.
| Author details: | Jose Negrete, Alain Pumir, Hsin-Fang Hsu, Christian Westendorf, Marco Tarantola, Carsten BetaORCiDGND, Eberhard Bodenschatz |
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| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.148102 |
| ISSN: | 0031-9007 |
| ISSN: | 1079-7114 |
| Pubmed ID: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27740793 |
| Title of parent work (English): | Physical review letters |
| Publisher: | American Physical Society |
| Place of publishing: | College Park |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of first publication: | 2016 |
| Publication year: | 2016 |
| Release date: | 2020/03/22 |
| Volume: | 117 |
| Number of pages: | 5 |
| Funding institution: | Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [SFB 937] |
| Organizational units: | Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Physik und Astronomie |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
