Modeling heterogeneous responsiveness of intrinsic apoptosis pathway
Apoptosis is a cell suicide mechanism that enables multicellular organisms to maintain homeostasis and to eliminate individual cells that threaten the organisms survival. Dependent on the type of stimulus, apoptosis can be propagated by extrinsic pathway or intrinsic pathway. The comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanism of apoptotic signaling allows for development of mathematical models, aiming to elucidate dynamical and systems properties of apoptotic signaling networks. There have been extensive efforts in modeling deterministic apoptosis network accounting for average behavior of a population of cells. Cellular networks, however, are inherently stochastic and significant cell-to-cell variability in apoptosis response has been observed at single cell level.
intrinsic apoptosis pathway stochastic model intrinsic noise extrinsic noise