Related papers: Precise and scalable self-organization in mammalia…
Developmental processes in multicellular organisms occur far from equilibrium, yet produce complex patterns with astonishing reproducibility. We measure the precision and reproducibility of bilaterally symmetric fly wings across the natural…
The emergence of spatial patterns and organized growth is a hallmark of developing tissues. While symmetry-breaking and scaling laws govern these processes, how cells coordinate spatial patterning with size regulation remains unclear. Here,…
Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…
Precise temporal coordination of gene expression is crucial for many developmental processes. One central question in developmental biology is how such coordinated expression patterns are robustly controlled. During embryonic development of…
Cell fate decisions in multicellular organisms are precisely coordinated, leading to highly reproducible macroscopic outcomes of developmental processes. The origins of this reproducibility can be found at the molecular level during the…
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…
The prevalence of multicellular organisms is due in part to their ability to form complex structures. How cells pack in these structures is a fundamental biophysical issue, underlying their functional properties. However, much remains…
A major challenge in biology is explaining how novel characters originate, however, the molecular mechanisms that underlie the emergence of evolutionary innovations are unclear. Here we show that while gene expression in the uterus evolves…
Gene expression is inherently noisy as many steps in the read-out of the genetic information are stochastic. To disentangle the effect of different sources of stochasticity in such systems, we consider various models that describe some…
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 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…
The early fly embryo offers a relatively pure version of the problem of spatial scaling in biological pattern formation. Within three hours, a "blueprint" for the final segmented body plan of the animal is visible in striped patterns of…
Cell growth in size is a complex process coordinated by intrinsic and environmental signals. In a recent work [Tzur et al., Science, 2009, 325:167-171], size distributions in an exponentially growing population of mammalian cells were used…
Important cellular processes such as migration, differentiation, and development often rely on precise timing. Yet, the molecular machinery that regulates timing is inherently noisy. How do cells achieve precise timing with noisy…
Cell growth and gene expression, essential elements of all living systems, have long been the focus of biophysical interrogation. Advances in single-cell methods have invigorated theoretical studies into these processes. However, until…
Tissue self-organization into defined and well-controlled three-dimensional structures is essential during development for the generation of organs. A similar, but highly deranged process might also occur during the aberrant growth of…
Growth-elasticity is a powerful model framework for understanding complex shape development in soft biological tissues. At each instant, by mapping how continuum building blocks have grown geometrically and how they respond elastically to…
A big challenge in current biology is to understand the exact self-organization mechanism underlying complex multi-physics coupling developmental processes. With multiscale computations of from subcellular gene expressions to cell…
"Self-organization" has become a watchword in developmental biology, characterizing observations in which embryonic or induced stem cells of animals replicate morphological steps and outcomes seen in intact embryos. While the term was…
The evolutionary origins of structural features in reconstructed gene-regulatory networks (GRNs) remain poorly understood, especially given the random aspects of gene expression. Here, we extend a classical model of GRN evolution to allow a…