Related papers: Precision and reproducibility of macroscopic devel…
Cell fate decisions in multicellular organisms are precisely coordinated, leading to highly reproducible macroscopic outcomes of developmental processes. The origins of this reproducibility can be found at the molecular level during the…
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 early fly embryo offers a relatively pure version of the problem of spatial scaling in biological pattern formation. Within three hours, a "blueprint" for the final segmented body plan of the animal is visible in striped patterns of…
Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we…
Organismal phenotypes emerge from a complex set of genotypic interactions. While technological advances in sequencing provide a quantitative description of an organism's genotype, characterization of an organism's physical phenotype lags…
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…
Precise temporal coordination of gene expression is crucial for many developmental processes. One central question in developmental biology is how such coordinated expression patterns are robustly controlled. During embryonic development of…
Embryonic development involves pattern formation characterized by the emergence of spatially localized domains characterized by distinct cell fates resulting from differential gene expression. The boundaries demarcating these domains are…
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…
Cells in a developing embryo have no direct way of "measuring" their physical position. Through a variety of processes, however, the expression levels of multiple genes come to be correlated with position, and these expression levels thus…
We experimentally probe complex bio-photonic architecture of microstructures on the transparent insect wings by a simple, non-invasive, real time optical technique. A stable and reproducible far-field diffraction pattern in transmission was…
Interactions between neighboring cells are essential for generating or refining patterns in a number of biological systems. We propose a discrete filtering approach to predict how networks of cells modulate spatially varying input signals…
During embryogenesis tissue layers continuously rearrange and fold into specific shapes. Developmental biology identified patterns of gene expression and cytoskeletal regulation underlying local tissue dynamics, but how actions of multiple…
In early development, regulation of transcription results in precisely positioned and highly reproducible expression patterns that specify cellular identities. How transcription, a fundamentally noisy molecular process, is regulated to…
The simultaneous expression of the hunchback gene in the numerous nuclei of the developing fly embryo gives us a unique opportunity to study how transcription is regulated in living organisms. A recently developed MS2-MCP technique for…
The concept of positional information is central to our understanding of how cells in a multicellular structure determine their developmental fates. Nevertheless, positional information has neither been defined mathematically nor quantified…
Development in multi-cellular organisms is marked by a high degree of spatial organization of the cells attaining distinct fates in the embryo. We show that receptor-ligand interaction between cells in close physical proximity adaptively…
Embryonic development relies on the formation of sharp, precise gene expression boundaries. In the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, boundary formation has been proposed to occur at a dynamical critical point. Yet, in the paradigmatic case…
In multicellular organisms, patterns of gene expression are established in response to gradients of signaling molecules. During fly development in early Drosophila embryos, the Bicoid (Bcd) morphogen gradient is established within the first…
During embryonic development, differentiating cells respond via gene expression to positional cues from morphogen gradients. While gene expression is often highly erratic, embryonic development is precise. We show by theory and simulations…