Synchronization of Degrade-and-Fire Oscillations via a Common Activator
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: The development of synthetic gene oscillators has not only demonstrated our ability to forward engineer reliable circuits in living cells, but it has also proven to be an excellent testing ground for the statistical behavior of coupled noisy oscillators. Previous experimental studies demonstrated that a shared positive feedback can reliably synchronize such oscillators, though the theoretical mechanism was not studied in detail. In the present work, we examine an experimentally motivated stochastic model for coupled degrade-and-fire gene oscillators, where a core delayed negative feedback establishes oscillations within each cell, and a shared delayed positive feedback couples all cells. We use analytic and numerical techniques to investigate conditions for one cluster and multicluster synchrony. A nonzero delay in the shared positive feedback, as expected for the experimental systems, is found to be important for synchrony to occur.
Source: Physical Review Letters
Authors: William Mather, Jeff Hasty, Lev S. Tsimring
Institutions: Virginia Tech, University of California San Diego
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2058366990