Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 606250, 5 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/606250
Research Article

Effect of Delay on Selection Dynamics in Long-Term Sphere Culture of Cancer Stem Cells

Peng Tang,1 Aijun Fan,2 Jianquan Li,3 Jun Jiang,1 and Kaifa Wang4

1Breast Disease Center, Southwest Hospital, Third Military Medical University, Chongqing 400038, China
2Chongqing Academy of Science & Technology, Chongqing 401123, China
3Department of Applied Mathematics and Physics, Air Force Engineering University, Xi'an 710051, China
4School of Biomedical Engineering, Third Military Medical University, Chongqing 400038, China

Received 26 January 2013; Accepted 15 February 2013

Academic Editor: Yonghui Xia

Copyright © 2013 Peng Tang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

To quantitatively study the effect of delay on selection dynamics in long-term sphere culture of cancer stem cells (CSCs), a selection dynamic model with time delay is proposed. Theoretical results show that the ubiquitous time delay in cell proliferation may be one of the important factors to induce fluctuation, and numerical simulations indicate that the proposed selection dynamical model with time delay can provide a better fitting effect for the experiment of a long-term sphere culture of CSCs. Thus, it is valuable to consider the delay effect in the future study on the dynamics of nongenetic heterogeneity of clonal cell populations.