Parameter-robustness analysis for a biochemical oscillator model describing the social-behaviour transition phase of myxobacteria

Abstract

We develop a tool based on bifurcation analysis for parameter-robustness analysis for a class of oscillators and, in particular, examine a biochemical oscillator that describes the transition phase between social behaviours of myxobacteria. Myxobacteria are a particular group of soil bacteria that have two dogmatically different types of social behaviour: when food is abundant they live fairly isolated forming swarms, but when food is scarce, they aggregate into a multicellular organism. In the transition between the two types of behaviours, spatial wave patterns are produced, which is generally believed to be regulated by a certain biochemical clock that controls the direction of myxobacteria’s motion. We provide a detailed analysis of such a clock and show that, for the proposed model, there exists some interval in parameter space where the behaviour is robust, i.e. the system behaves similarly for all parameter values. In more mathematical terms, we show the existence and convergence of trajectories to a limit cycle, and provide estimates of the parameter under which such a behaviour occurs. In addition, we show that the reported convergence result is robust, in the sense that any small change in the parameters leads to the same qualitative behaviour of the solution.