English

Coordinated Spatial Pattern Formation in Biomolecular Communication Networks

Molecular Networks 2019-01-08 v4 Systems and Control Pattern Formation and Solitons

Abstract

This paper proposes a control theoretic framework to model and analyze the self-organized pattern formation of molecular concentrations in biomolecular communication networks, emerging applications in synthetic biology. In biomolecular communication networks, bionanomachines, or biological cells, communicate with each other using a cell-to-cell communication mechanism mediated by a diffusible signaling molecule, thereby the dynamics of molecular concentrations are approximately modeled as a reaction-diffusion system with a single diffuser. We first introduce a feedback model representation of the reaction-diffusion system and provide a systematic local stability/instability analysis tool using the root locus of the feedback system. The instability analysis then allows us to analytically derive the conditions for the self-organized spatial pattern formation, or Turing pattern formation, of the bionanomachines. We propose a novel synthetic biocircuit motif called activator-repressor-diffuser system and show that it is one of the minimum biomolecular circuits that admit self-organized patterns over cell population.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1504.06045,
  title  = {Coordinated Spatial Pattern Formation in Biomolecular Communication Networks},
  author = {Yutaka Hori and Hiroki Miyazako and Soichiro Kumagai and Shinji Hara},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.06045},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:21:01.297Z