Bridging Scales to Model Emergent Collective Oscillations in Social Amoeba

A key challenge in modeling emergent biological behaviors such as collective oscillations is identifying what dynamical features are important to capture at the level of individuals to recapitulate group-wide phenomena. To address this, we conducted a case study on five major existing models that describe intracellular collective cyclic AMP (cAMP) oscillations in the social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum. We compared each model to published experimental findings about how amoeba cells modulate internal cAMP dynamics in response to external changes in cAMP. By doing so we evaluated how well these models recapitulate the observed behaviors. All models reproduce group-wide signaling oscillations and a majority are able to reproduce some single cell observations. Our main observation is models that do a good job recapitulating single cell dynamics are better at reproducing a critical feature of group oscillations: tuning their group oscillation rate in response to changes in cell density and the cAMP dilution rate. Overall, we find that accurate recapitulation of single cell dynamics and noise are important for modeling qualitative group oscillations.