From Intracellular Signaling to Population Oscillations: Bridging Scales in Collective Behavior

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that simple mathematical models can effectively connect intracellular signaling dynamics to collective oscillations in cellular populations, revealing universal principles of biological collective behavior.

Contribution

The study introduces a simple modeling approach to link intracellular signaling networks with population oscillations, validated by experimental data in Dictyostelium discoideum.

Findings

Simple models describe complex signaling networks effectively.

Predicted and observed noise-driven signaling phenomena.

Collective behavior may follow universal physical principles.

Abstract

Collective behavior in cellular populations is coordinated by biochemical signaling networks within individual cells. Connecting the dynamics of these intracellular networks to the population phenomena they control poses a considerable challenge because of network complexity and our limited knowledge of kinetic parameters. However, from physical systems we know that behavioral changes in the individual constituents of a collectively-behaving system occur in a limited number of well-defined classes, and these can be described using simple models. Here we apply such an approach to the emergence of collective oscillations in cellular populations of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. Through direct tests of our model with quantitative in vivo measurements of single-cell and population signaling dynamics, we show how a simple model can effectively describe a complex molecular signaling network and its effects at multiple size and temporal scales. The model predicts novel noise-driven single-cell and population-level signaling phenomena that we then experimentally observe. Our results suggest that like physical systems, collective behavior in biology may be universal and described using simple mathematical models.