A numerical study of synchronization in the process of biochemical substance exchange in a diffusively coupled ring of cells

Abstract

In this paper we numerically investigate a model of a diffusively coupled ring of cells. To model the dynamics of individual cells we propose a map with cell affinity, which is a generalization of the logistic map. First, the basic features of a one-cell system are studied in terms of the Lyapunov exponent, Kolmogorov complexity and Sample Entropy. Second, the notion of observational heterarchy, which is a perpetual negotiation process between different levels of the description of a phenomenon, is reviewed. After these preliminaries, we study how the active coupling induced by the consideration of the observational heterarchy modifies the synchronization property of the model with N=100 cells. It is shown numerically that the active coupling enhances synchronization of biochemical substance exchange in several different conditions of cell affinity. © 2013 Versita Warsaw and Springer-Verlag Wien.