Modeling of intercellular synchronization in the Drosophila circadian clock

In circadian rhythm generation, intercellular signaling factors areshown to play a crucial role in both sustaining intrinsic cellularrhythmicity and acquiring collective behaviours across a populationof circadian neurons. However, the physical mechanism behind theirrole remains to be fully understood. In this paper, we propose anindirectly coupled multicellular model for the synchronization ofDrosophila circadian oscillators combining both intracellularand intercellular dynamics. By simulating different experimentalconditions, we find that such an indirect coupling way cansynchronize both heterogeneous self-sustained circadian neurons andheterogeneous mutational damped circadian neurons. Moreover, theycan also be entrained to ambient light--dark (LD) cycles depending onintercellular signaling.