Fig 1. Single-cell bioluminescence recordings show that higher stochastic noise results in faster damping at the population-level.

Data on the bioluminescence of single-cell fibroblasts was taken from Leise et al., 2012 [22]. (A) Cells were sorted into two groups depending on their degree of stochastic noise. An example trace from each of the two groups is shown, demonstrating different levels of noise present in the dataset. (B) After artificially synchronizing each cell, we calculate averaged bioluminescence rhythms of each group (solid lines). A damped sinusoid fit to both groups reveals a difference in damping rate, demonstrated by fitted envelope functions (±Aexp−dt, dashed lines). (C) The observed absolute difference in damping rate was shown to be significant (p = 0.0264) using 10,000 bootstrap trials.