Quantifying Heterogeneity of Cell Death

Heterogeneity is a common property of biological signalling systems. In most cases, heterogeneity is described qualitatively, only for some classes of responses have qualitative measures been proposed. For cell death signalling, this paper is the first to propose a quantification of heterogeneity. The challenge hereby is the dual aspect of heterogeneity. First, only part of the cell population may die while the others survive a specific death stimulus. Second, the time of death can vary from cell to cell.