Related papers: Quantifying the Bicoid morphogen gradient in livin…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
Animal morphogenesis involves complex tissue deformation processes, which require tight control over tissue rheology. Yet, it remains insufficiently understood how tissue rheology results from the interplay between cellular packing and…
We present a general methodology in order to build mathematical models of genetic regulatory networks. This approach is based on the mass action law and on the Jacob and Monod operon model. The mathematical models are built symbolically by…
Gene expression is inherently noisy, posing a challenge to understanding how precise and reproducible patterns of gene expression emerge in mammals. We investigate this phenomenon using gastruloids, an in vitro model for early mammalian…
The time required to transcribe genes with long primary transcripts may limit their ability to be expressed in cells with short mitotic cycles, a phenomenon termed intron delay. As such short cycles are a hallmark of the earliest stages of…
Based on a recently proposed non-equilibrium mechanism for spatial pattern formation [cond-mat/0312366] we study how morphogenesis can be controlled by locally coupled discrete dynamical networks, similar to gene regulation networks of…
Drosophila melanogaster, a small dipteran of African origin, represents one of the best-studied model organisms. Early work in this system has uniquely shed light on the basic principles of genetics and resulted in a versatile collection of…
Bacteria can form a great variety of spatially heterogeneous cell density patterns, ranging from simple concentric rings to dynamical spiral waves appearing in growing colonies. These pattern formation phenomena are important as they…
Cellular bioelectricity describes the biological phenomenon in which cells in living tissue generate and maintain patterns of voltage gradients induced by differing concentrations of charged ions. A growing body of research suggests that…
A morphogenic protein known as Dorsal patterns the embryonic dorsoventral body axis of Drosophila by binding to transcriptional enhancers across the genome. Each such enhancer activates a neighboring gene at a unique threshold concentration…
A key process in the life of any multicellular organism is its development from a single egg into a full grown adult. The first step in this process often consists of forming a tissue layer out of randomly placed cells on the surface of the…
Morphogen profiles allow cells to determine their position within a developing organism, but the mechanisms behind the formation of these profiles are still not well agreed upon. Here we derive fundamental limits to the precision of…
Expression of the Drosophila segment polarity genes is initiated by a prepattern of pair-rule gene products and maintained by a network of regulatory interactions throughout several stages of embryonic development. Analysis of a model of…
This work probes the role of cell geometry in orienting self-organized fluid flows in the late stage Drosophila oocyte. Recent theoretical work has shown that a model, which relies only on hydrodynamic interactions of flexible, cortically…
The timing of cell divisions in early embryos during the In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) process is a key predictor of embryo viability. However, observing cell divisions in Time-Lapse Monitoring (TLM) is a time-consuming process and highly…
The process of morphogenesis, which can be defined as an evolution of the form of an organism, is one of the most intriguing mysteries in the life sciences. It is clear, that gene expression patterns cannot explain the development of the…
Even the simplest of animals exhibit behavioral sequences with complex temporal dynamics. Prominent amongst the proposed organizing principles for these dynamics has been the idea of a hierarchy, wherein the movements an animal makes can be…
Epithelial cells form diverse structures from squamous spherical organoids to densely packed pseudostratified tissues. Quantification of cellular properties in these contexts requires high-resolution deep imaging and computational…
The Drosophila melanogaster embryo, an elongated multi-nucleated cell, is a classical model system for eukaryotic development and morphogenesis. Recent work has shown that bulk cytoplasmic flows, driven by cortical contractions along the…
In a developing embryo, information about the position of cells is encoded in the concentrations of "morphogen" molecules. In the fruit fly, the local concentrations of just a handful of proteins encoded by the gap genes are sufficient to…