Spatiotemporal patterns enhanced by intra and inter-molecular fluctuations in arrays of allosterically regulated enzymes

Abstract

Enzymatic reactions often involve slow conformational changes, with reaction cycles that sometimes require milliseconds or seconds to complete. The dynamics are strongly affected by fluctuations at the nanoscale. However, such enzymes often occur in small numbers in a cell; hence, the fluctuations caused by finite numbers of molecules should also be substantial. Because of these factors, the behavior of the system is likely to deviate from that of classical reaction-diffusion equations, in which immediate reaction events are assumed to occur without memory and between a huge number of molecules. In this work, we model each enzyme as a unit represented by a phase variable to investigate the effects of fluctuations in arrays of enzymes. Using an analysis based on partial differential equations and stochastic simulations, we show that fluctuations arising from internal states of enzymes (intramolecular fluctuations) and those arising from the stochastic nature of interactions between molecules (intermolecular fluctuations) have distinctive effects on spatiotemporal patterns; the former generally disturb synchronization at high frequencies, whereas the latter can enhance synchronization. The balance of the two types of fluctuations may determine the spatiotemporal behavior of biochemical processes.