European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ECMTB 2026)

Identifiability of phenotypic adaptation from low-cell-count experiments and a stochastic model

MS60-01

16 Jul 2026, 10:40

20m

11.02 - HS (University of Graz)

Minisymposium Talk Cellular and Developmental Biology Identifying the origin and consequences of non-genetic cell-to-cell variability

Speaker

Alexander Browning (University of Melbourne)

Description

In this talk, we develop a stochastic individual-based model of phenotypic adaptation through a continuously structured phenotype space. Probabilistically, our model corresponds to common partial differential equation models of phenotypic heterogeneity, allowing us to formulate a likelihood that captures the intrinsic noise ubiquitous to low-cell-count proliferation assays. We apply our framework to study the identifiability of key model parameters relating to the adaptation velocity and cell-to-cell heterogeneity. Significantly, we find that cell-to-cell heterogeneity is practically non-identifiable from both cell count and proliferation marker data, implying that population-level behaviours may be well characterised by homogeneous ordinary differential equation models.

Bibliography

@article{browning2025identifiability,
title={Identifiability of phenotypic adaptation from low-cell-count experiments and a stochastic model},
author={Browning, Alexander P and Crossley, Rebecca M and Villa, Chiara and Maini, Philip K and Jenner, Adrianne L and Cassidy, Tyler and Hamis, Sara},
journal={PLoS Computational Biology},
volume={21},
number={6},
pages={e1013202},
year={2025},
publisher={Public Library of Science San Francisco, CA USA}
}