Authors: Tim Rudge Kevin Burrage
Publish Date: 2008/03/13
Volume: 70, Issue: 4, Pages: 971-991
Abstract
Epithelial pattern formation is an important phenomenon that for example has roles in embryogenesis development and woundhealing The ligand Epithelial Growth Factor EGF and its receptor EGFR constitute a system that forms lateral induction patterns by juxtacrine signalling—binding of membranebound ligands to receptors on neighbouring cells Owen et al developed a generic ordinary differential equation model of juxtacrine lateral induction that exhibits stable patterning under some conditions The model predicts relatively slow pattern formation We examine here the effects of both intrinsic and extrinsic cellular noise arising from the stochastic treatment of this model and show that this noise could have an accelerating effect on the patterning process
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