title: Noisy Oscillations in the Actin Cytoskeleton of Chemotactic Amoeba.
abstract: Biological systems with their complex biochemical networks are known to be intrinsically noisy. Here we investigate the dynamics of actin polymerization of amoeboid cells, which are close to the onset of oscillations. We show that the large phenotypic variability in the polymerization dynamics can be accurately captured by a generic nonlinear oscillator model in the presence of noise. We determine the relative role of the noise with a single dimensionless, experimentally accessible parameter, thus providing a quantitative description of the variability in a population of cells. Our approach, which rests on a generic description of a system close to a Hopf bifurcation and includes the effect of noise, can characterize the dynamics of a large class of noisy systems close to an oscillatory instability.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), D-37077 Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Jose
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Negrete
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), D-37077 Göttingen, Germany.|Laboratoire de Physique, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Université de Lyon 1 and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, F-69007 Lyon, France.
authors.forename: Alain
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pumir
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), D-37077 Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Hsin-Fang
authors.initials: HF
authors.lastname: Hsu
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), D-37077 Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Westendorf
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), D-37077 Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tarantola
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), D-37077 Göttingen, Germany.|Institute of Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam, D-14476 Potsdam, Germany.
authors.forename: Carsten
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Beta
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), D-37077 Göttingen, Germany.|Institute for Nonlinear Dynamics, University of Göttingen, D-37073 Göttingen, Germany.|Laboratory of Atomic and Solid-State Physics and Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA.
authors.forename: Eberhard
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bodenschatz
mesh_terms: D008841:Actin Cytoskeleton; D000656:Amoeba; D002633:Chemotaxis; D008954:Models, Biological; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics