Related papers: Precision and reproducibility of macroscopic devel…
The body plan of the fruit fly is determined by the expression of just a handful of genes. We show that the spatial patterns of expression for several of these genes scale precisely with the size of the embryo. Concretely, discrete…
Bristled and membranous insect wings have co-evolved despite apparently serving the same functionality. We emulate flight physics using an automated free-fall experiment to better understand how and why several distinct wing forms may have…
Like a rocket being propelled into space, evolution has engineered flies to launch into adulthood via multiple stages. Flies develop and deploy two distinct bodies, linked by the transformative process of metamorphosis. The fly larva is a…
Spatial patterns in the early fruit fly embryo emerge from a network of interactions among transcription factors, the gap genes, driven by maternal inputs. Such networks can exhibit many qualitatively different behaviors, separated by…
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…
Developing epithelial tissues coordinate cell proliferation and mechanical forces to achieve proper size and shape. As epithelial cells tightly adhere together to form the confluent tissue, the distribution of cell areas significantly…
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…
The wings in different insect species are morphologically distinct with regards to their size, outer contour (margin) shape, venation, and pigmentation. The basis of the diversity of wing margin shapes remains unknown, despite the fact that…
Gene expression levels are important molecular quantitative traits that link genotypes to molecular functions and fitness. In Drosophila, population-genetic studies in recent years have revealed substantial adaptive evolution at the genomic…
In many tissues, cell type varies over single-cell length-scales, creating detailed spatial heterogeneities fundamental to physiological function. To gain understanding of this relationship between tissue function and detailed structure,…
We present a theory of pattern formation in growing domains inspired by biological examples of tissue development. Gradients of signaling molecules regulate growth, while growth changes these graded chemical patterns by dilution and…
Based on a non-equilibrium mechanism for spatial pattern formation we study how position information can be controlled by locally coupled discrete dynamical networks, similar to gene regulation networks of cells in a developing…
Complex spatial and temporal patterns of gene expression underlie embryo differentiation, yet methods do not yet exist for the efficient genome-wide determination of spatial expression patterns during development. In situ imaging of…
During developmental processes such as embryogenesis, how a group of cells fold into specific structures, is a central question in biology that defines how living organisms form. Establishing tissue-level morphology critically relies on how…
The spongy mesophyll is a complex, porous tissue found in plant leaves that enables carbon capture and provides mechanical stability. Unlike many other biological tissues, which remain confluent throughout development, the spongy mesophyll…
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…
The precise layout of gene expression patterns is a crucial step in development. Formation of a sharp boundary between high and low expression domains requires a genetic mechanism which is both sensitive and robust to fluctuations, a demand…
Within developing embryos, tissues flow and reorganize dramatically on timescales as short as minutes. This includes epithelial tissues, which often narrow and elongate in convergent extension movements due to anisotropies in external…
Development combines three basic processes asymmetric --- cell division, signaling and gene regulation --- in a multitude of ways to create an overwhelming diversity of multicellular life-forms. Here, we attempt to chart this diversity…
Epigenetic Tracking is a mathematical model of biological cells, originally conceived to study embryonic development. Computer simulations proved the capacity of the model to generate complex 3-dimensional cellular structures, and the…