Related papers: Flags, Landscapes and Signaling: Contact-mediated …
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 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…
A crucial step in the early development of multicellular organisms involves the establishment of spatial patterns of gene expression which later direct proliferating cells to take on different cell fates. These patterns enable the cells to…
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…
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 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…
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,…
Multicellular organisms contain a wide variety of highly specialized cell types. The consistency and robustness of developmental trajectories suggest that complex gene regulatory networks effectively act as low-dimensional cell fate…
Multicellular tissues are the building blocks of many biological systems and organs. These tissues are not static, but dynamically change over time. Even if the overall structure remains the same there is a turnover of cells within the…
Notch signaling is an evolutionary conserved cell-cell communication pathway. Besides regulating cell-fate decisions at an individual cell level, Notch signaling coordinates the emergent spatiotemporal patterning in a tissue through…
Many biological, physical, and social interactions have a particular dependence on where they take place. In living cells, protein movement between the nucleus and cytoplasm affects cellular response (i.e., proteins must be present in the…
Cell fate decisions emerge as a consequence of a complex set of gene regulatory networks. Models of these networks are known to have more parameters than data can determine. Recent work, inspired by Waddington's metaphor of a landscape, has…
During organismal development, biochemical reaction networks sense and respond to mechanical forces to coordinate embryonic patterning with embryo morphogenesis. Factors such as cortical tension, cell density, and matrix mechanical…
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…
Many patterning events in multi-cellular organisms rely on cell-to-cell contact signaling, such as the Notch pathway in metazoans. A particularly interesting phenomenon in this form of communication is lateral inhibition where a cell that…
Cells self-organize into functional, ordered structures during tissue morphogenesis, a process that is evocative of colloidal self-assembly into engineered soft materials. Understanding how inter-cellular mechanical interactions may drive…
We typically think of cells as responding to external signals independently by regulating their gene expression levels, yet they often locally exchange information and coordinate. Can such spatial coupling be of benefit for conveying…
A common metaphor for describing development is a rugged "epigenetic landscape" where cell fates are represented as attracting valleys resulting from a complex regulatory network. Here, we introduce a framework for explicitly constructing…
During development, cell fates are determined through a combination of intracellular transcriptional regulations and extracellular signaling. As a result, spatial patterns of different cell types arise. We investigate the decision between…
The complexity of gene regulatory networks in multicellular organisms makes interpretable low-dimensional models highly desirable. An attractive geometric picture, attributed to Waddington, visualizes the differentiation of a cell into…