Figure 1.

Behavior of Different Specific Control Mechanisms

All control mechanisms have at least one population with time-increasing variance and so have increasing heteroplasmy variance; mean heteroplasmy $\langle h\rangle$ remains constant through these simulations.

(A) Replication $\lambda \left(w,m\right)$ and degradation $\nu \left(w,m\right)$ rates for model control mechanisms explored in the text, from existing studies and newly proposed here.

(B and C) Copy number and heteroplasmy moments with time for these control mechanisms, (B) in the absence of cell divisions and (C) with binomial cell divisions every 10 days. Analytic results (lines; full expressions in Supplemental Data Section 3) match stochastic simulation (crosses) throughout. Parameters used are chosen to support the same steady state $\left(\tilde{w}=900,\tilde{m}=100\right)$ and with a turnover timescale of $\tau =5$ days. Other parameters: $\gamma =0,{\alpha }_m=0.001,\alpha =2$ (except for models B, E, and F, for which $\alpha =0.002,0.002,200$ respectively); 10⁵ stochastic simulations used.