title: Communication-induced multistability and multirhythmicity in a synthetic multicellular system.
abstract: Traditionally, the main role of cell-to-cell communication was thought of as synchronizing a population of cells, thereby coordinating cellular behavior. Here we show that cell density, which quantifies cellular communication, can induce multistability and multirhythmicity in a synthetic multicellular system, where individual oscillators are a combination of repressillator and hysteresis-based oscillators and are coupled through a quorum-sensing mechanism. Specifically, for moderately small cell densities, the coupled system can exhibit multistability including stable homogenous and inhomogeneous steady states. For moderately large cell densities, it has the potential to generate multirhythmicity including multimode oscillations such as an in-phase periodic solution, antiphase periodic solution, asymmetric periodic solution, mixed-mode oscillations, coexistence of periodic orbits of several different modes, and bursting oscillations such as periodic bursting, torus quasiperiodic bursting, and chaotic bursting. Such versatility of cell-to-cell communication would be beneficial for cells or organisms to live in diversely changeable environments.
authors: School of Mathematics and Computational Science, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China.
authors: Qizhi
authors: Q
authors: Yi
authors: Tianshou
authors: T
authors: Zhou
mesh_terms: D002450:Cell Communication; D008954:Models, Biological; D010507:Periodicity