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Characterizing the Impact of Communication on Cellular and Collective Behavior Using a Three-Dimensional Multiscale
Moriah Echlin1,2, Boris Aguilar2, Ilya Shmulevich2
1Prostate Cancer Research Center, Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University, FI-33014 Tampere, Finland.
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
|February 25, 2023
Summary
Cell-cell communication significantly impacts cellular and population behavior, influencing tissue composition and diversity. This study identifies six distinct communication forms, crucial for engineering and modifying biological systems.
Area of Science:
- Systems Biology
- Computational Biology
- Synthetic Biology
Background:
- Cell-cell communication is vital for biological complexity, enabling coordination in single and multicellular organisms.
- Existing research is limited by confounding biological factors and evolutionary biases.
- Synthetic systems increasingly leverage cell-cell communication.
Purpose of the Study:
- To advance context-free understanding of cell-cell communication's impact on cellular and population behavior.
- To explore the potential for utilizing, modifying, and engineering cell-cell communication systems.
- To investigate the influence of communication parameters on biological systems.
Main Methods:
- Utilized an in silico model of 3D multiscale cellular populations.
- Incorporated dynamic intracellular networks interacting via diffusible signals.
- Focused on two key parameters: effective interaction distance and receptor activation threshold.
Main Results:
- Identified six distinct forms of cell-cell communication (three asocial, three social).
- Demonstrated high sensitivity of cellular behavior, tissue composition, and diversity to communication parameters.
- Showed that communication impacts systems even without pre-existing biases.
Conclusions:
- Cell-cell communication profoundly shapes biological systems independent of evolutionary context.
- Understanding communication parameters is key to engineering biological systems.
- Six forms of communication offer a framework for analyzing and manipulating cellular interactions.
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