PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Taishi Kakizuka
AU  - Yusuke Hara
AU  - Yusaku Ohta
AU  - Asuka Mukai
AU  - Aya Ichiraku
AU  - Yoshiyuki Arai
AU  - Taro Ichimura
AU  - Takeharu Nagai
AU  - Kazuki Horikawa
TI  - Cellular logics bringing the symmetry breaking in spiral nucleation revealed by trans-scale imaging
AID  - 10.1101/2020.06.29.176891
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.06.29.176891
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/29/2020.06.29.176891.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/29/2020.06.29.176891.full
AB  - The spiral wave is a commonly observed spatio-temporal order in diverse signal relaying systems. Although properties of generated spirals have been well studied, the mechanisms for their spontaneous generation in living systems remain elusive. By the newly developed imaging system for trans-scale observation of the intercellular communication among ∼130,000 cells of social amoeba, we investigated the onset dynamics of cAMP signaling and identified mechanisms for the self-organization of the spiral wave at three distinct scalings: At the population-level, the structured heterogeneity of excitability fragments traveling waves at its high/low boundary, that becomes the generic source of the spiral wave. At the cell-level, both the pacemaking leaders and pulse-amplifying followers regulate the heterogeneous growth of the excitability. At the intermediate-scale, the essence of the spontaneous wave fragmentation is the asymmetric positioning of the pacemakers in the high-excitability territories, whose critical controls are operated by a small number of cells, pulse counts, and pulse amounts.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.