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Updated: Aug 11, 2026

Spatiotemporal Analysis of Cytokinetic Events in Fission Yeast
Published on: February 20, 2017
Bifurcation analysis of a model of the budding yeast cell cycle
Dorjsuren Battogtokh1, John J Tyson
1Department of Biology, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, USA. dbattogt@vt.edu
Abstract:
We study the bifurcations of a set of nine nonlinear ordinary differential equations that describe regulation of the cyclin-dependent kinase that triggers DNA synthesis and mitosis in the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We show that Clb2-dependent kinase exhibits bistability (stable steady states of high or low kinase activity). The transition from low to high Clb2-dependent kinase activity is driven by transient activation of Cln2-dependent kinase, and the reverse transition is driven by transient activation of the Clb2 degradation machinery. We show that a four-variable model retains the main features of the nine-variable model. In a three-variable model exhibiting birhythmicity (two stable oscillatory states), we explore possible effects of extrinsic fluctuations on cell cycle progression.
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