Spatial Effects of Delay-induced Stochastic Oscillations in a Multi-Cellular System

Abstract

We explore the joint effect of the intrinsic noise and time delay on the spatial pattern formation within a multi-scale mobile lattice model of the epithelium. The protein fluctuations are driven by transcription/translation processes in epithelial cells exchanging chemical and mechanical signals and are described by a single-gene auto-repressor model with constant delay. Both deterministic and stochastic descriptions are given. We found that time delay, noise and spatial signaling can result in the protein pattern formation even when deterministic description exhibits no patterns.