Today the complexity of synthetic gene regulatory circuits that can be embedded into a cell is quite limited. This article develops and studies a mathematical model of a distributed gene oscillator that can reduce the number of synthetic genes in the cell through the use of two cell populations, which potentially frees up space for additional functional genes. A possible onset of self-oscillations is shown, the dependence of the threshold on the system parameters is studied, and the ability to synchronize the various centers of oscillations in the model of inhomogeneous planar cell cultures is demonstrated.
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