Buffering variability in cell regulation motifs close to criticality

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cooperative interactions in bistable biological systems near critical points help buffer variability and prevent noise-induced shifts, while also enabling early detection of regime changes through statistical signals.

Contribution

It introduces a generic minimal-model framework to analyze robustness and variability in biological regulation motifs close to criticality, highlighting the role of cooperativity.

Findings

Cooperative interactions buffer system variability near critical points.

Early warning signals can detect impending regime shifts.

Framework applicable to complex models and empirical data.

Abstract

Bistable biological regulatory systems need to cope with stochastic noise to fine-tune their function close to bifurcation points. Here, we study stability properties of this regime in generic systems to demonstrate that cooperative interactions buffer system variability, hampering noise-induced regime shifts. Our analysis also shows that, in the considered cooperativity range, impending regime shifts can be generically detected by statistical early warning signals from distributional data. Our generic framework, based on minimal models, can be used to extract robustness and variability properties of more complex models and empirical data close to criticality.