Cellular heterogeneity is an immanent property of biological systems that covers very different aspects of life ranging from genetic diversity to cell-to-cell variability driven by stochastic molecular interactions, and noise induced cell differentia
tion. Here, we review recent developments in characterizing cellular heterogeneity by distributions and argue that understanding multicellular life requires the analysis of heterogeneity dynamics at single cell resolution by integrative approaches that combine methods from non-equilibrium statistical physics, information theory and omics biology.
The subject of analysis is a non-linear three-compartment model, widely used in pharmacological absorption studies. It has been transformed into a general form, thus leading automatically to an appropriate approximation. This made the absorption prof
ile accessible and expressions for absorption times, apparent permeabilities and equilibrium values were given. These findings allowed a profound analysis of results from non-linear curve fits and delivered the dependencies on the systems parameters over a wide range of values. The results were applied to an absorption experiment with multidrug transporter-affected antibiotic CNV97100 on Caco-2 cell monolayers.
