Autophagy is a process, where components within a cell are degraded and recycled for different purposes. This can especially be helpful when cells are starving and they have to adapt rapidly to the new conditions to ensure their survival. For studying this process, yeast has become a model organism, since autophagy is easy to control and observe within these cells. Furthermore, autophagy could be connected to different human diseases like cancer or Huntington’s disease. To get a better understanding of the basic principles and interrelations, mathematical models can be helpful. Therefore, we want to study the process of autophagy from a mathematical point of view.
In this work, we first set up two single-cell models for starvation induced autophagy in yeast cells and analyse their properties mathematically. In a next step, we expand the first single-cell model to the multi-cell case and perform again a mathematical analysis. Using data on cell densities, we then fit our model parameters and examine the sensitiv- ity of the model to its parameters. In a final step, we introduce different modifications of the multi-cell model, to improve the fit of the model to our data. We compare the resulting model fits and discuss their different properties.
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Autophagy is a process, where components within a cell are degraded and recycled for different purposes. This can especially be helpful when cells are starving and they have to adapt rapidly to the new conditions to ensure their survival. For studying this process, yeast has become a model organism, since autophagy is easy to control and observe within these cells. Furthermore, autophagy could be connected to different human diseases like cancer or Huntington’s disease. To get a better understan...
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