Stochastic modeling of a gene regulatory network driving B cell development in germinal centers

by Alexey Koshkin, Ulysse Herbach, María Rodríguez Martínez, Olivier Gandrillon, Fabien Crauste

Germinal centers (GCs) are the key histological structures of the adaptive immune system, responsible for the development and selection of B cells producing high-affinity antibodies against antigens. Due to their level of complexity, unexpected malfunctioning may lead to a range of pathologies, including various malignant formations. One promising way to improve the understanding of malignant transformation is to study the underlying gene regulatory networks (GRNs) associated with cell development and differentiation. Evaluation and inference of the GRN structure from gene expression data is a challenging task in systems biology: recent achievements in single-cell (SC) transcriptomics allow the generation of SC gene expression data, which can be used to sharpen the knowledge on GRN structure. In order to understand whether a particular network of three key gene regulators (BCL6, IRF4, BLIMP1), influenced by two external stimuli signals (surface receptors BCR and CD40), is able to describe GC B cell differentiation, we used a stochastic model to fit SC transcriptomic data from a human lymphoid organ dataset. The model is defined mathematically as a piecewise-deterministic Markov process. We showed that after parameter tuning, the model qualitatively recapitulates mRNA distributions corresponding to GC and plasmablast stages of B cell differentiation. Thus, the model can assist in validating the GRN structure and, in the future, could lead to better understanding of the different types of dysfunction of the regulatory mechanisms.