A model of apoptosis receptor reactions to study cell fate decision

Abstract

The apoptotic signaling pathway designates a set of biochemical reactions involved in programmed cell death. One of the triggering mechanisms of apoptosis is the binding of death ligands to death receptors on the cell membrane, a known stimulus for the activation of the so-called extrinsic apoptosis signaling pathway. Stimulation by death ligands results in an important variability in cell response dynamics that elicits differing fates: cell survival or cell death. To understand the hallmarks of this cell fate decision and the heterogeneity of cell response, a system of ordinary differential equations based on mass-action rate laws was implemented to represent the reactions at the receptor level and evaluate the cell dynamics in response to anticancer drugs.