title: Network characteristics of collective chemosensing.
abstract: The collective chemosensing of nonexcitable mammalian cells involves a biochemical network that features gap junction communications and heterogeneous single cell activities. To understand the integrated multicellular chemosensing, we study the calcium dynamics of micropatterned fibroblast cell colonies in response to adenosine triphosphate (ATP) stimulation. We find that the cross-correlation function between the responses of individual cells decays with topological distance as a power law for large colonies and much faster for smaller colonies. Furthermore, the strongly correlated cell pairs tend to form clusters and are more likely to exceed the percolation threshold. At a given topological distance, the cross-correlations exhibit characteristics of Poisson distributions, which allows us to estimate the unitary conductance of a single gap junction which is in good agreement with direct experimental measurements.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: Physico-Chimie Curie, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR 168, Institut Curie, 26, rue d'Ulm, F-75248 Paris Cedex 05, France.
authors.forename: Guillaume
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Duclos
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
authors.forename: Howard A
authors.initials: HA
authors.lastname: Stone
mesh_terms: D000255:Adenosine Triphosphate / Q000494:pharmacology*; D000818:Animals; D002118:Calcium / Q000378:metabolism; D002450:Cell Communication / Q000187:drug effects* / Q000502:physiology; D005347:Fibroblasts / Q000166:cytology* / Q000187:drug effects* / Q000378:metabolism; D017629:Gap Junctions / Q000187:drug effects / Q000378:metabolism; D051379:Mice; D008954:Models, Biological; D041681:NIH 3T3 Cells; D016012:Poisson Distribution
chemical_list: D000255:Adenosine Triphosphate; D002118:Calcium