Fig. 2

Schematic diagram and trajectories of the mathematical model inferred from the quantitative data. a A schematic diagram of the intercellular interactions inferred from the experimental data and represented by Eq. (1). b Trajectories of the numbers of thymocytes and TECs obtained by simulating Eq. (1) with the optimally fitted parameter set. The curves represent simulated trajectories, and the points represent the same experimental data as Fig. 1b. Cell types are designated by the color codes which are defined in a. c Trajectories obtained by the bootstrap parameter estimation. Trajectories in different panels with the same color correspond to a simulation with a parameter set estimated from a bootstrapped sample. The trajectories of 100 randomly selected samples are shown in the panels. The points represent the same experimental data as Fig. 1b.