Amplified Biochemical Oscillations in Cellular Systems

By Alan J. McKane, J. D. Nagy, T. Newman, M. Stefanini. 2006

111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe a mechanism for pronounced biochemical oscillations, relevant to microscopic systems, such as the intracellular environment. This mechanism operates for reaction schemes which, when modeled using deterministic rate equations, fail to exhibit oscillations for any values of rate constants. The mechanism relies on amplification of the underlying stochasticity of reaction kinetics within a narrow window of frequencies. This amplification means that fluctuations have a dominant effect, even though the number of molecules in the system is relatively large. The mechanism is quantitatively studied within simple models of self-regulatory gene expression, and glycolytic oscillations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Molecular Biology, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bdcd474e5e94879ddcbfe23897311e1fe27205cd

Citations in the corpus

• Investigating the robustness of the classical enzyme kinetic equations in small intracellular compartments (2009, unknown): “We conclude by placing our work in the context of previous recent studies of stochastic enzyme kinetics and discuss possible experiments to verify some of the conclusions we have reached.”