Stochastic Noise and Synchronisation during Dictyostelium Aggregation Make cAMP Oscillations Robust
Figure 6
Extended Stochastic Model (Five Cells): Robustness Analysis of the Period and Amplitude of the Internal cAMP Oscillations with Respect to Perturbations in the Model Parameters and Initial Conditions
The first row shows the period distribution of the stochastic model for three cells with 5%, 10%, and 20% perturbations, and the second row shows the amplitude distribution. The peak bar at 20 min for the period distributions represents the total number of cells that are not oscillating. The proportion of non-oscillating cells increases from 0% to 12% as the size of the perturbation increases, which is smaller than the proportion seen in either the deterministic or stochastic single cell models. The distributions of the amplitudes show a similar tendency, i.e., the mean decreases and the standard deviation increases as the magnitude of the perturbation increases. Each plot is the result of 100 simulations for different random samples of the model parameters, the cell volume, and initial conditions using a uniform distribution about the nominal values.