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Stable Stochastic Dynamics in Yeast Cell Cycle

Yurie Okabe ^* and Masaki Sasai ^* 

^* Department of Computational Science and Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan; and Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology-Japan Science and Technology Agency, Nagoya, Japan

Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Masaki Sasai, E-mail: sasai{at}cse.nagoya-u.ac.jp.

Chemical reactions in cells are subject to intense stochastic fluctuations. An important question is how the fundamental physiological behavior of the cell is kept stable against those noisy perturbations. In this study, a stochastic model of the cell cycle of budding yeast was constructed to analyze the effects of noise on the cell-cycle oscillation. The model predicts intense noise in levels of mRNAs and proteins, and the simulated protein levels explain the observed statistical tendency of noise in populations of synchronous and asynchronous cells. Despite intense noise in levels of proteins and mRNAs, the cell cycle is stable enough to bring the largely perturbed cells back to the physiological cyclic oscillation. The model shows that consecutively appearing fixed points are the origin of this stability of the cell cycle.