Publication Title
J R Soc Interface
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-1-2017
Keywords
Metabolism; Models, Biological; Stochastic Processes
Abstract
The notion of an attractor has been widely employed in thinking about the nonlinear dynamics of organisms and biological phenomena as systems and as processes. The notion of a landscape with valleys and mountains encoding multiple attractors, however, has a rigorous foundation only for closed, thermodynamically non-driven, chemical systems, such as a protein. Recent advances in the theory of nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems and its applications to mesoscopic reaction networks, one reaction at a time, have provided a new basis for a landscape of open, driven biochemical reaction systems under sustained chemostat. The theory is equally applicable not only to intracellular dynamics of biochemical regulatory networks within an individual cell but also to tissue dynamics of heterogeneous interacting cell populations. The landscape for an individual cell, applicable to a population of isogenic non-interacting cells under the same environmental conditions, is defined on the counting space of intracellular chemical compositions
Specialty
Institute for Systems Biology