Related papers: Precision of morphogen-driven tissue patterning du…
Controlling growth via cell division is crucial in the development of higher organisms, and yet the mechanisms through which this is achieved, e.g., in epithelial tissue, is not yet fully understood. We show that by coupling the cell cycle…
We consider a free boundary problem for a system of PDEs, modeling the growth of a biological tissue. A morphogen, controlling volume growth, is produced by specific cells and then diffused and absorbed throughout the domain. The geometric…
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…
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…
Spatial distributions of morphogens provide positional information in developing systems, but how the distributions are established and maintained remains an open problem. Transport by diffusion has been the traditional mechanism, but…
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…
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…
Cells generally change their internal state to adapt to an environmental change, and accordingly evolve in response to the new conditions. This process involves phenotypic changes that occur over several different time scales, ranging from…
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…
The development of multicellular organisms relies on the precise coordination of molecular events across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Understanding how information flows from molecular interactions to cellular processes and tissue…
Morphogen transport is a biological process, occurring in the tissue of living organisms, which is a determining step in cell differentiation. We present rigorous analysis of a simple model of this process, which is a system coupling…
Morphogen profiles play a vital role in biology by specifying position in embryonic development. However, the factors that influence the shape of a morphogen profile remain poorly understood. Since morphogens should provide precise…
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…
Cell lineage decisions occur in three-dimensional spatial patterns that are difficult to identify by eye. There is an ongoing effort to replicate such patterns using mathematical modeling. One approach uses long ranging cell-cell…
Since its introduction in 1952, Turing's (pre-)pattern theory ("the chemical basis of morphogenesis") has been widely applied to a number of areas in developmental biology. The related pattern formation models normally comprise a system of…
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…
Cells often exhibit different and stable phenotypes from the same DNA sequence. Robustness and plasticity of such cellular states are controlled by diverse transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms, among them the modification of…
A key feature of many developmental systems is their ability to self-organize spatial patterns of functionally distinct cell fates. To ensure proper biological function, such patterns must be established reproducibly, by controlling and…
The fundamental biological processes of development of tissues and organs in multicellular organisms is governed by various signaling molecules, which are called morphogens. It is known that spatial and temporal variations in concentration…
We discovered a class of self-similar solutions in nonlinear models describing the formation of morphogen gradients, the concentration fields of molecules acting as spatial regulators of cell differention in developing tissues. These models…