Regulation of Spatiotemporal Patterns by Biological Variability: General Principles and Applications to Dictyostelium discoideum.

ABSTRACT: Spatiotemporal patterns often emerge from local interactions in a self-organizing fashion. In biology, the resulting patterns are also subject to the influence of the systematic differences between the system's constituents (biological variability). This regulation of spatiotemporal patterns by biological variability is the topic of our review. We discuss several examples of correlations between cell properties and the self-organized spatiotemporal patterns, together with their relevance for biology. Our guiding, illustrative example will be spiral waves of cAMP in a colony of Dictyostelium discoideum cells. Analogous processes take place in diverse situations (such as cardiac tissue, where spiral waves occur in potentially fatal ventricular fibrillation) so a deeper understanding of this

SUBMITTER: Grace M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4643012 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature