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National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 30(101), p. 10955-10960, 2004

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0307095101

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Modeling a synthetic multicellular clock: Repressilators coupled by quorum sensing

Journal article published in 2004 by Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo ORCID, Michael B. Elowitz, Steven H. Strogatz ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Diverse biochemical rhythms are generated by thousands of cellular oscillators that somehow manage to operate synchronously. In fields ranging from circadian biology to endocrinology, it remains an exciting challenge to understand how collective rhythms emerge in multicellular structures. Using mathematical and computational modeling, we study the effect of coupling through intercell signaling in a population of Escherichia coli cells expressing a synthetic biological clock. Our results predict that a diverse and noisy community of such genetic oscillators interacting through a quorum-sensing mechanism should self-synchronize in a robust way, leading to a substantially improved global rhythmicity in the system. As such, the particular system of coupled genetic oscillators considered here might be a good candidate to provide the first quantitative example of a synchronization transition in a population of biological oscillators.