论文标题
反应扩散系统中的基因表达时间延迟
Gene Expression Time Delays in Reaction-Diffusion Systems
论文作者
论文摘要
基因表达时间延迟,建模基因转录和翻译的复杂生物学过程,已被证明在细胞动力学中起着重要作用。由基因表达过程激发的时间延迟也会极大地影响反应扩散系统的行为。在本文中,我们探讨了它们对图灵模式机制的影响。通过将时间延迟合并为固定参数又是连续分布,将其纳入表现出图灵不稳定性的经典反应扩散系统中,我们研究了这些系统的变化行为。我们发现,增加时间延迟的引入增加了空间不均匀模式以稳定的时间,两者是线性相关的。我们还提出了通过线性稳定性分析表明的结果,表明增加的时间延迟可以起作用以扩展或缩小特定反应扩散机制的图灵空间,具体取决于时间延迟的项的放置。值得注意的是,我们发现建模时间延迟作为连续分布对所见结果的定性或定量方面的影响可忽略不计,与分布平均值的固定时间延迟相比。这些发现旨在强调在建模生物模式事件时考虑基因表达时间延迟的重要性,并在尝试应用图灵机制来解释生物学现象之前,需要对细胞动力学进行完全了解。结果还表明,至少对于本文中考虑的分布,固定的延迟和分布式延迟模型几乎具有相同的动力学。这允许人们使用更简单的固定延迟模型,而不是更复杂的分布式延迟变体。
Gene expression time delays, modelling the complex biological processes of gene transcription and translation, have been shown to play an important role in cellular dynamics. Time delays, motivated by the gene expression process, can also greatly affect the behaviour of reaction-diffusion systems. In this dissertation, we explore their effects on Turing pattern mechanisms. By incorporating time delays, modelled as both a fixed parameter and as a continuous distribution, into classical reaction-diffusion systems that exhibit Turing instabilities, we investigate the changing behaviour of these systems. We find that an introduction of increasing time delay increases the time taken for spatially inhomogeneous patterns to stabilise, and the two are related linearly. We also present results to show, through a linear stability analysis, that an increasing time delay can act both to expand or shrink the Turing space of a certain reaction-diffusion mechanism, depending on the placement of time-delayed terms. Significantly, we find that modelling time delays as a continuous distribution has a negligible impact on qualitative or quantitative aspects of the results seen compared with a fixed time delay of the mean of the distribution. These findings serve to highlight the importance of considering gene expression time delays when modelling biological patterning events, as well as requiring a complete understanding of the cellular dynamics before attempting to apply Turing mechanisms to explain biological phenomena. The results also suggest, at least for the distributions considered in this dissertation, that fixed delay and distributed delay models have almost identical dynamics. This allows one to use simpler fixed delay models rather than the more complicated distributed delay variants.