Phase Clusters in Large Populations of Chemical Oscillators

摘要

Bacteria and other unicellular organisms communicate by exchange of chemical signaling species through the extracellular solution. In a phenomenon known as quorum sensing, synchronized activity is triggered when the population density or group size reaches a threshold value. Many oscillatory chemical processes in cells, for example, glycolysis, become synchronized across a population by this type of coupling mechanism. The dynamical mechanism of quorum sensing has been studied in biological and nonbiological systems, in which a sudden "switching" transition from one dynamical state to another has been found; for example, individual yeast cells switch from steady-state to oscillatory behavior on reaching a threshold cell density.