CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Biological systems are spatially organized. From domains to compartments, the concentration of different cellular molecules is far from homogeneous. This microscopic heterogeneity has been shown to produce emergent complex behaviors such as bistability. Even though the connection between spatiality and dynamic response is essential to understand biological output, its robustness and extent has not been sufficiently explored. Starting from a previously described system which is composed of two monostable modules acting on different cellular compartments and sharing species through shuttling reactions, we explored its vast parameter space in order to assess the robustness of the emergent bistability. To further describe the origin of the bistability we performed gradual simplifications monitoring that bistability is conserved. The simplified system again connects two monostable systems with minimal nonlinearities by a reduced set of linear shuttling reactions that circulates all the species around the two compartments. Since bistable systems are one of the main building blocks of more complex behaviors such as oscillations, memory and digitalization, we expect that the proposed minimal system provides insight into how these behaviors can arise from compartmentalization.