Large Scale-Invariant Fluctuations in Normal Blood Cell Counts: A sign of criticality?

Abstract

All types of blood cells are formed by differentiation from a small self-maintaining population of pluri-potential stem cells in the bone marrow. Despite abundant information on the molecular aspects of division, differentiation, commitment and maturation of these cells, comparatively little is known about the dynamics of the system as a whole, and how it works to maintain this complex ``ecology'' in the observed normal ranges throughout life. Here we report unexpected large, scale-free, fluctuations detected from the first long-term analysis of the day-to-day variability of a healthy animal's blood cell counts measured over one thousand days. This scale-invariance cannot be accounted for by current theoretical models, and resembles some of the scenarios described for self-organized criticality.