Chaos out of internal noise in the collective dynamics of diffusively coupled cells

Abstract.

We study the transition from stochasticity to determinism in calcium oscillations via diffusive coupling of individual cells that are modeled by stochastic simulations of the governing reaction-diffusion equations. As expected, the stochastic solutions gradually converge to their deterministic limit as the number of coupled cells increases. Remarkably however, although the strict deterministic limit dictates a fully periodic behavior, the stochastic solution remains chaotic even for large numbers of coupled cells if the system is set close to an inherently chaotic regime. On the other hand, the lack of proximity to a chaotic regime leads to an expected convergence to the fully periodic behavior, thus suggesting that near-chaotic states are presently a crucial predisposition for the observation of noise-induced chaos. Our results suggest that chaos may exist in real biological systems due to intrinsic fluctuations and uncertainties characterizing their functioning on small scales.