Related papers: Precision of morphogen-driven tissue patterning du…
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…
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…
Multicellular organisms exhibit a high degree of structural organization with specific cell types always occurring in characteristic locations. The conventional framework for describing the emergence of such consistent spatial patterns is…
During tissue development, patterns of gene expression determine the spatial arrangement of cell types. In many cases, gradients of secreted signaling molecules - morphogens - guide this process. The continuous positional information…
In many developmental systems, cells differentiate into a tissue by reading out morphogen concentration fields, a process fundamentally limited by noise. How much can the precision of this process be improved by nonlocal information, e.g.,…
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…
Search for possible relationships between phylogeny and ontogeny is one of the most important issues in the field of evolutionary developmental biology. By representing developmental dynamics of spatially located cells with gene expression…
During development, spatio-temporal patterns ranging from checkerboard to engulfing occur with precise proportions of the respective cell fates. Key developmental regulators are intracellular transcriptional interactions and intercellular…
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…
During the development of an organism, cells must coordinate and organize to generate the correct shape, structure, and spatial patterns of tissues and organs, a process known as morphogenesis. The morphogenesis of embryonic tissues is…
We show that when cells communicate by contact-mediated interactions, heterogeneity in cell shapes and sizes leads to qualitatively distinct collective behavior in the tissue. For inter-cellular coupling that implements lateral inhibition,…
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…
We propose a unified mechanism that reproduces the sequence of dynamical transitions observed during somitogenesis, the process of body segmentation during embryonic development, that is invariant across all vertebrate species. This is…
Successful biological development via spatial regulation of cell differentiation relies on action of multiple signaling molecules that are known as morphogens. It is now well established that signaling molecules create non-uniform…
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…
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…
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…
The fundamental processes of biological development are governed by multiple signaling molecules that create non-uniform concentration profiles known as morphogen gradients. It is widely believed that the establishment of morphogen…
Morphogens are proteins, often produced in a localised region, whose concentrations spatially demarcate regions of differing gene expression in developing embryos. The boundaries of expression must be set accurately and in proportion to 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…