Temporal stochasticity leads to nondeterministic chaos in a model for blood cell production

All types of blood cells are formed by differentiation from a small population of pluripotent stem cells in the bone marrow. This population should maintain the balance between self-renewal and differentiation, even under severe perturbations, such as the massive Cell. death caused by chemotherapy or irradiation. We constructed a cellular-automata model for bone marrow dynamics that retrieves its homeostatic capabilities even under periodic perturbations with constant or random amplitude. However, temporally stochastic perturbations result in a chaotic-like behavior. Several methods of analysis failed to distinguish between the time series in this case and a chaotic time series, although the chaotic-like behavior has no deterministic source.