An agent-based model of the fission yeast cell cycle
Authored by Dora-Luz Flores, Carlos Castro, David Cervantes-Vasquez, Eunice Vargas-Viveros, Everardo Gutierrez-Lopez, Franklin Munoz-Munoz
Date Published: 2019
DOI: 10.1007/s00294-018-0859-z
Sponsors:
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnologicas
Platforms:
NetLogo
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to develop a computational model of the
fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) cell cycle using agent-based
modeling (ABM), to study the sequence of states of the proteins and time
of the cell cycle phases, under the action of proteins that regulate its
cell cycle. The model relies only on the conceptual model of the yeast
cell cycle regulatory network, where each protein has been represented
as an agent with a property called activity that represents its
biological function and a stochastic Brownian movement. The results
indicate that the simulated phase time did have similar results in
comparison with other models using mathematical approaches. Similarly,
the correct sequence of states was achieved, and the model was run under
different initial states to understand its emergent behaviors. The cell
reached the G1 stationary state 94\% of the times when running the model
under biological initial conditions and 87\% of the times when running
the model through all the different combinations of initial states. Such
results imply that the cell was capable to fix toward the biological
expected phenomena. These results show that ABM is a suitable technique
to study protein-protein interactions without using, often unavailable,
kinetic parameters, or differential equations. This model sets as a base
for further studies that involve the cell cycle of the fission yeast,
with a special attention to studies and development of drug treatments
for specific types of cancer.
Tags
Agent-based modeling
Dynamics
cell cycle
cancer
Mathematical-model
Fission yeast