Figure 3

Effect of the transport factor of PatS ( D ) on the average distance between heterocysts. A: Simulations were performed using 1000 random uniformly distributed binary initial conditions, restricted to biologically feasible conditions. is independent of the number of cells for D < 0.8. With higher values of D, the inhibitory activity of PatS to adjacent cells increases. For D close to 1 the average corresponds to the total number of cells as only one cell differentiates, which corresponds to an average distance equal to the number of cells. B: Simulations were performed using 5000 random uniformly distributed binary initial conditions, restricted to biologically feasible conditions. The minimum value of this function is for D = 0.767 which gives a of 10.