Related papers: Organ-specific Branching Morphogenesis
During the early-stages of embryo development, morphogenesis--- the emergence of shape and form in living organisms--- is almost exclusively associated with monolayers of tightly bound epithelial cells. To understand how such tissues change…
This paper deals with a model of cellular growth called "Epigenetic Tracking", whose key features are: i) distinction bewteen "normal" and "driver" cells; ii) presence in driver cells of an epigenetic memory, that holds the position of the…
This paper describes an Artificial Embryology method (called ``Epigenetic Tracking'') to generate predefined arbitrarily shaped 2-dimensional arrays of cells by means of evolutionary techniques. It is based on a model of development, whose…
Many living and non-living complex systems can be modeled and understood as collective systems made of heterogeneous components that self-organize and generate nontrivial morphological structures and behaviors. This chapter presents a brief…
A central question in developmental biology is how size and position are determined. The genetic code carries instructions on how to control these properties in order to regulate the pattern and morphology of structures in the developing…
During embryonic development tissue morphogenesis and signaling are tightly coupled. It is therefore important to simulate both tissue morphogenesis and signaling simultaneously in in silico models of developmental processes. The resolution…
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…
Biological systems across various length and time scales are noisy, including tissues. Why are biological tissues inherently chaotic? Does heterogeneity play a role in determining the physiology and pathology of tissues? How do physical and…
The growth of plants is a hydromechanical phenomenon in which cells enlarge by absorbing water, while their walls expand and remodel under turgor-induced tension. In multicellular tissues, where cells are mechanically interconnected,…
Neuronal morphology is an essential element for brain activity and function. We take advantage of current availability of brain-wide neuron digital reconstructions of the Pyramidal cells from a mouse brain, and analyze several emergent…
Rhythmic and sequential segmentation of the embryonic body plan is a vital developmental patterning process in all vertebrate species. However, a theoretical framework capturing the emergence of dynamic patterns of gene expression from the…
The applicability of computational and dynamical systems models to organisms is scrutinized, using examples from developmental biology and cognition. Developmental morphogenesis is dependent on the inherent material properties of developing…
Gene regulatory network (GRN)-based morphogenetic models have recently gained an increasing attention. However, the relationship between microscopic properties of intracellular GRNs and macroscopic properties of morphogenetic systems has…
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…
The shapes of epithelial tissues result from a complex interplay of contractile forces in the cytoskeleta of the cells in the tissue, and adhesion forces between them. A host of discrete, cell-based models describe these forces by assigning…
Organogenesis has been studied for decades, but fundamental questions regarding the control of growth and shape remain unsolved. We have recently shown that of all proposed mathematical models only ligand-receptor based Turing models…
During morphogenesis, a featureless convex cerebellum develops folds. As it does so, the cortex thickness is thinnest at the crest (gyri) and thickest at the trough (sulci) of the folds. This observation cannot be simply explained by…
From the Golgi apparatus to endosomes, organelles in the endomembrane system exhibit complex and varied morphologies that are often related to their function. Such membrane-bound organelles operate far from equilibrium due to directed…
Whereas the relationship between criticality of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) and dynamics of GRNs at a single cell level has been vigorously studied, the relationship between the criticality of GRNs and system properties at a higher…
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…