No Arabic abstract
Continuous cultures of mammalian cells are complex systems displaying hallmark phenomena of nonlinear dynamics, such as multi-stability, hysteresis, as well as sharp transitions between different metabolic states. In this context mathematical models may suggest control strategies to steer the system towards desired states. Although even clonal populations are known to exhibit cell-to-cell variability, most of the currently studied models assume that the population is homogeneous. To overcome this limitation, we use the maximum entropy principle to model the phenotypic distribution of cells in a chemostat as a function of the dilution rate. We consider the coupling between cell metabolism and extracellular variables describing the state of the bioreactor and take into account the impact of toxic byproduct accumulation on cell viability. We present a formal solution for the stationary state of the chemostat and show how to apply it in two examples. First, a simplified model of cell metabolism where the exact solution is tractable, and then a genome-scale metabolic network of the Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell line. Along the way we discuss several consequences of heterogeneity, such as: qualitative changes in the dynamical landscape of the system, increasing concentrations of byproducts that vanish in the homogeneous case, and larger population sizes.
We present a model for continuous cell culture coupling intra-cellular metabolism to extracellular variables describing the state of the bioreactor, taking into account the growth capacity of the cell and the impact of toxic byproduct accumulation. We provide a method to determine the steady states of this system that is tractable for metabolic networks of arbitrary complexity. We demonstrate our approach in a toy model first, and then in a genome-scale metabolic network of the Chinese hamster ovary cell line, obtaining results that are in qualitative agreement with experimental observations. More importantly, we derive a number of consequences from the model that are independent of parameter values. First, that the ratio between cell density and dilution rate is an ideal control parameter to fix a steady state with desired metabolic properties invariant across perfusion systems. This conclusion is robust even in the presence of multi-stability, which is explained in our model by the negative feedback loop on cell growth due to toxic byproduct accumulation. Moreover, a complex landscape of steady states in continuous cell culture emerges from our simulations, including multiple metabolic switches, which also explain why cell-line and media benchmarks carried out in batch culture cannot be extrapolated to perfusion. On the other hand, we predict invariance laws between continuous cell cultures with different parameters. A practical consequence is that the chemostat is an ideal experimental model for large-scale high-density perfusion cultures, where the complex landscape of metabolic transitions is faithfully reproduced. Thus, in order to actually reflect the expected behavior in perfusion, performance benchmarks of cell-lines and culture media should be carried out in a chemostat.
A fundamental question in biology is how cell populations evolve into different subtypes based on homogeneous processes at the single cell level. Here we show that population bimodality can emerge even when biological processes are homogenous at the cell level and the environment is kept constant. Our model is based on the stochastic partitioning of a cell component with an optimal copy number. We show that the existence of unimodal or bimodal distributions depends on the variance of partition errors and the growth rate tolerance around the optimal copy number. In particular, our theory provides a consistent explanation for the maintenance of aneuploid states in a population. The proposed model can also be relevant for other cell components such as mitochondria and plasmids, whose abundances affect the growth rate and are subject to stochastic partition at cell division.
Neural populations encode information about their stimulus in a collective fashion, by joint activity patterns of spiking and silence. A full account of this mapping from stimulus to neural activity is given by the conditional probability distribution over neural codewords given the sensory input. To be able to infer a model for this distribution from large-scale neural recordings, we introduce a stimulus-dependent maximum entropy (SDME) model---a minimal extension of the canonical linear-nonlinear model of a single neuron, to a pairwise-coupled neural population. The model is able to capture the single-cell response properties as well as the correlations in neural spiking due to shared stimulus and due to effective neuron-to-neuron connections. Here we show that in a population of 100 retinal ganglion cells in the salamander retina responding to temporal white-noise stimuli, dependencies between cells play an important encoding role. As a result, the SDME model gives a more accurate account of single cell responses and in particular outperforms uncoupled models in reproducing the distributions of codewords emitted in response to a stimulus. We show how the SDME model, in conjunction with static maximum entropy models of population vocabulary, can be used to estimate information-theoretic quantities like surprise and information transmission in a neural population.
Microbial metabolic networks perform the basic function of harvesting energy from nutrients to generate the work and free energy required for survival, growth and replication. The robust physiological outcomes they generate across vastly different organisms in spite of major environmental and genetic differences represent an especially remarkable trait. Most notably, it suggests that metabolic activity in bacteria may follow universal principles, the search for which is a long-standing issue. Most theoretical approaches to modeling metabolism assume that cells optimize specific evolutionarily-motivated objective functions (like their growth rate) under general physico-chemical or regulatory constraints. While conceptually and practically useful in many situations, the idea that certain objectives are optimized is hard to validate in data. Moreover, it is not clear how optimality can be reconciled with the degree of single-cell variability observed within microbial populations. To shed light on these issues, we propose here an inverse modeling framework that connects fitness to variability through the Maximum-Entropy guided inference of metabolic flux distributions from data. While no clear optimization emerges, we find that, as the medium gets richer, Escherichia coli populations slowly approach the theoretically optimal performance defined by minimal reduction of phenotypic variability at given mean growth rate. Inferred flux distributions provide multiple biological insights, including on metabolic reactions that are experimentally inaccessible. These results suggest that bacterial metabolism is crucially shaped by a population-level trade-off between fitness and cell-to-cell heterogeneity.
We study the stable attractors of a class of continuous dynamical systems that may be idealized as networks of Boolean elements, with the goal of determining which Boolean attractors, if any, are good approximations of the attractors of generic continuous systems. We investigate the dynamics in simple rings and rings with one additional self-input. An analysis of switching characteristics and pulse propagation explains the relation between attractors of the continuous systems and their Boolean approximations. For simple rings, reliable Boolean attractors correspond to stable continuous attractors. For networks with more complex logic, the qualitative features of continuous attractors are influenced by inherently non-Boolean characteristics of switching events.