The effect of system size on collective behavior in a synthetic multicellular system

This paper mainly investigates the effect of system size on collective behavior in a synthetic multicellular system, where individual oscillators are a combination of repressilator and hysteresis-based oscillators and are coupled through a quorum-sensing mechanism. By bifurcation analysis and numerical simulation we find that the increase in cell number can change the size of the stability interval of steady state cluster and induce new clustering behaviors, and is beneficial to enlarge the attraction basin of steady state cluster, which suggests that cell differentiation may be closely related to system size, in addition, considerably enriches the manifestations and coexisting modes of steady state cluster and oscillatory cluster, which provides a good basis for the adaptability of organism to the environment.