Computing the Threshold of the Influence of Intercellular Nanotubes on Cell-to-Cell Communication Integrity

We examine the threshold of the influence of the tunneling nanotubes (TNTs) on the cell-to-cell communication integrity. A deterministic model is introduced with the Michaelis-Menten dynamics and the intercellular exchange of substance. The influence of TNTs are considered as a functional perturbation of the main communication and treated as the matrix nearness problems. We analyze communication integrity in terms of the \emph{pseudospectra} of the exchange, to find the \emph{distance to instability}. The threshold of TNTs influence is computed for Newman-Gastner and Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi gap junction (GJ) networks.