Author : Erin Nicole Urwin
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781124358918
Total Pages : 114 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (589 download)
Book Synopsis Stochastic Modeling of Cellular Cooperation by : Erin Nicole Urwin
Download or read book Stochastic Modeling of Cellular Cooperation written by Erin Nicole Urwin and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cooperation in biology is a well-known enigma. It is in an individual cell's best interest to behave selfishly, but it is in a collection of cells' best interest if each cell cooperates. We explore aspects of cooperative behavior in the context of cellular systems. We concentrate on spatial aspects of cooperation and study how spatial restrictions effect colony survival. We examine three stochastic models through numerical simulation along with analytic methods. In our first model, we explore the impact of cheaters on a cooperative network of cells. We observe that strict spatial constraints impede harmful effects of cheaters. We note that a similar result was previously observed, by M. Nowak et al, albeit in a different system [13, 12]. We explored an application of our modeling approach to cooperating yeast specifically engineered to demonstrate effects of cooperation [14]. We explored the effects of the presence of cheaters in such a system and found that the viability of colonies depended non-monotonically on the ability of cells to cooperate. This suggests an avenue for further biological experiments. In our last model, we explore cooperative aspects of evolution. We ask the question, "is it more advantageous for cells to acquire each mutation sequentially or to have different cells acquire different mutations and then have them cooperate?" Traditional multi-stage carcinogenesis models depict cancer evolving as a sequence of mutations within each cell. A possible advantage to this evolutionary strategy is that cells are self-sufficient. Possible disadvantageous are that mutations take a long time to occur, and so evolution is very slow. If cells achieve different mutations and then cooperate to form a cancerous phenotype, then they are able to evolve faster. However, they are reliant on others. If one cell type is lost, the whole colony could suffer and so the colony is more prone to stochastic extinction. We found that cooperation speeds up evolution significantly. We also found that the presence of cheaters speeds up evolution even more. This result was surprising because in other contexts cheaters decrease the longevity of a colony.
