Spatial Effects of Delay-induced Stochastic Oscillations in a Multi-Cellular System

TL;DR

This paper investigates how intrinsic noise and time delay influence spatial pattern formation in a multi-cellular epithelial model, revealing that stochastic effects can induce patterns absent in deterministic models.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-scale lattice model incorporating delay and noise, demonstrating their combined role in pattern formation beyond deterministic predictions.

Findings

Time delay, noise, and spatial signaling can induce protein patterns.

Stochastic effects can generate patterns not seen in deterministic models.

The model links cellular signaling dynamics to spatial pattern emergence.

Abstract

We explore the joint effect of the intrinsic noise and time delay on the spatial pattern formation within a multi-scale mobile lattice model of the epithelium. The protein fluctuations are driven by transcription/translation processes in epithelial cells exchanging chemical and mechanical signals and are described by a single-gene auto-repressor model with constant delay. Both deterministic and stochastic descriptions are given. We found that time delay, noise and spatial signaling can result in the protein pattern formation even when deterministic description exhibits no patterns.