Network characteristics of collective chemosensing
Bo Sun, Guillaume Duclos, and Howard A. Stone
Accepted
The collective chemosensing of non-excitable mammalian cells involves a biochemical network that features gap junction communications and heterogeneous single cell activities. To understand the integrated multicellular chemosensing, we study the calcium dynamics of micro-patterned fibroblast cell colonies in response to ATP stimulation. We find that the cross-correlation function between the responses of individual cells decays with topological distance as a power-law for large colonies and much faster for smaller colonies. Furthermore, the strongly correlated cell pairs tend to form clusters and are more likely to exceed the percolation threshold. At a given topological distance, the cross-correlations exhibit characteristics of Poisson distributions, which allows us to estimate the unitary conductance of a single gap junction which is in good agreement with direct experimental measurements.