Modeling compartmentalization within intracellular signaling pathway

Abstract

We present a new modeling approach for G protein coupled receptors signaling systems, that take into account the compartmentalization of receptors and their effectors, both at plasma membrane and in dynamic intra-cellular vesicles called endosomes. The first building block of the model is about compartment dynamics. It takes into account creation of de-novo endosomes, i.e. endocytosis, recycling of endosomes back to plasma membrane, degradation through transfer into lysosomes as well as endosomes fusion through coagulation dynamics. The second building block is biochemical reactions into each compartments and the transfer of molecules between the dynamical compartments. In this work, we prove sufficient conditions to obtain exponentially ergodicity for the size distribution of intracellular compartments. We futher design a finite volume scheme to simulate our model and show two application cases for receptor trafficking and spatially biased second effector signaling.