Understanding multimodal biological decisions from single cell and population dynamics

Modern techniques on single-cell and -molecule resolution reveal that gene and protein expressions between cells of an otherwise identical group are stochastic in time, and clonal population of cells display heterogeneity in the abundance of a given protein per cell at any measured time. Today, combinatorially, stochasticity and heterogeneity are considered as biological noise and are essential for generating phenotypic variations, cell fate decisions and amplification of molecular signals. Here, several works from experimental and theoretical aspects that show multimodal biological decisions at single cell and population level are reviewed. The emerging lessons from these studies suggest that, for yielding multimodal decisions, living systems are guided by well-defined nonlinear deterministic processes which are sensitive to specific range of biological parameters.