ABSTRACT
Understanding dynamic processes inside a single cell can be considered as the first step of understanding dynamics of an entire multicellular organism. Even if cells are seemingly identical in the cell population of interest, their dynamical behaviors can be very different from each other. Ignoring this cellular heterogeneity leads to inaccurate models on the single cell level which in turn produce inappropriate descriptions of dynamics of the whole organism. Bulk measurements giving average information about the cell population of interest may be insufficient to explain the dynamical behavior of a cell in the environment under consideration. The present chapter is devoted to give an overview about single cell technologies, modeling of reaction systems, the contribution of extrinsic and intrinsic noises to the cellular heterogeneity and inference methods that reconstruct the unknown states or parameters by using the given observed data.
