Основні поняття
Cellular automata models with local cell-cell signaling can generate robust and tunable axial patterning patterns, such as the French flag, without requiring global signaling mechanisms.
Анотація
The content explores alternative mechanisms for axial patterning in multicellular systems, focusing on strategies that rely only on local cell-cell signaling, rather than global signaling.
Key highlights:
- The authors use cellular automata (CA) models to investigate patterning strategies that can form axial patterns, such as the French flag pattern, using only local signaling between neighboring cells.
- An evolutionary algorithm is used to identify high-fitness CA rules that can generate the French flag pattern from random initial conditions. A consensus rule is then extracted through a multiple alignment procedure, revealing two key patterning modules: a sorting module and a bulldozer module.
- Expanding the rule space to 4 states enables the discovery of additional patterning strategies, including a pure sorting strategy and a full erase-and-reconstruct strategy, in addition to the mixed strategy of the 3-state consensus rule.
- The different patterning strategies are analyzed and compared in terms of their accuracy, speed, robustness to noise and growth, and tunability of the resulting patterns.
- The authors show that the patterning strategies based on local signaling can generate accurate axial patterns that scale with system size, while exhibiting different trade-offs between properties like robustness and patterning speed.
- The regulatory logic underlying the identified patterning modules could serve as a basis for the design of synthetic patterning systems and as a conceptual framework for interpreting biological patterning mechanisms.
Статистика
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Цитати
"Cellular automata (CA) as a minimal model of pattern formation via local cell-cell signaling."
"The regulatory logic underlying these modules could therefore serve as the basis for the design of synthetic patterning systems, and as a conceptual framework for the interpretation of biological mechanisms."
"Mechanisms based on short-range signaling, between cells and their neighbors, are particularly promising in this context."