Browsing by Author "Tralie, Christopher"

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    Long-term p21 and p53 trends regulate the frequency of mitosis events and cell cycle arrest
    (Preprint, 2021-08-19) Tran, Anh Phong; Tralie, Christopher; Moosmüller, Caroline; Belkhatir, Zehor; Reyes, José; Levine, Arnold; Deasy, Joseph; Tannenbaum, Allen
    Radiation exposure of healthy cells can halt cell cycle temporarily or permanently. In this work, two single cell datasets that monitored the time evolution of p21 and p53, one subjected to gamma irradiation and the other to x-ray irradiation, are analyzed to uncover the dynamics of this process. New insights into the biological mechanisms were found by decomposing the p53 and p21 signals into transient and oscillatory components. Through the use of dynamic time warping on the oscillatory components of the two signals, we found that p21 signaling lags behind its lead signal, p53, by about 3.5 hours with oscillation periods of around 6 hours. Additionally, through various quantification methods, we showed how p21 levels, and to a lesser extent p53 levels, dictate whether the cells are arrested in their cell cycle and how fast these cells divide depending on their long-term trend in these signals.
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    Periodicity Scoring of Time Series Encodes Dynamical Behavior of the Tumor Suppressor p53
    (Elsevier, 2021-07-16) Moosmüller, Caroline; Tralie, Christopher; Kooshkbaghi, Mahdi; Belkhatir, Zehor; Pouryahya, Maryam; Reyes, José; Deasy, Joseph; Tannenbaum, Allen; Kevrekidis, Ioannis
    In this paper we analyze the dynamical behavior of the tumor suppressor protein p53, an essential player in the cellular stress response, which prevents a cell from dividing if severe DNA damage is present. When this response system is malfunctioning, e.g. due to mutations in p53, uncontrolled cell proliferation may lead to the development of cancer. Understanding the behavior of p53 is thus crucial to prevent its failing. It has been shown in various experiments that periodicity of the p53 signal is one of the main descriptors of its dynamics, and that its pulsing behavior (regular vs. spontaneous) indicates the level and type of cellular stress. In the present work, we introduce an algorithm to score the local periodicity of a given time series (such as the p53 signal), which we call Detrended Autocorrelation Periodicity Scoring (DAPS). It applies pitch detection (via autocorrelation) on sliding windows of the entire time series to describe the overall periodicity by a distribution of localized pitch scores. We apply DAPS to the p53 time series obtained from single cell experiments and establish a correlation between the periodicity scoring of a cell’s p53 signal and the number of cell division events. In particular, we show that high periodicity scoring of p53 is correlated to a low number of cell divisions and vice versa. We show similar results with a more computationally intensive state-of-the-art periodicity scoring algorithm based on topology known as Sw1PerS. This correlation has two major implications: It demonstrates that periodicity scoring of the p53 signal is a good descriptor for cellular stress, and it connects the high variability of p53 periodicity observed in cell populations to the variability in the number of cell division events.