Regensburg 2010 – wissenschaftliches Programm
Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Downloads | Hilfe
BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 36: Posters: Tissue Dynamics, Charge Effects, and Anomalous Transport
BP 36.1: Poster
Donnerstag, 25. März 2010, 17:15–20:00, Poster B2
Self-organized growth regulation in developing epithelia — •Peer Mumcu1, Thomas Bittig1, Ortrud Wartlick2, Marcos González-Gaitán2, and Frank Jülicher1 — 1Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany — 2Department of Biochemistry and Department of Molecular Biology, Geneva University, Switzerland
Developing tissues possess intrinsic growth control mechanisms which determine the final size and shape. The basic principles of growth regulation are still poorly understood but it is widely accepted that certain morphogens act as growth factors that play a key role in this process. Morphogens are a special class of signaling molecules which are secreted from localized sources, spread throughout the tissue and provide cells with positional information. Focusing on the Drosophila fly wing as model system, we present a theoretical study of dynamical morphogen distributions in growing epithelia using a continuum theory and a description which is based on discrete cells. The discrete description combines a two-dimensional vertex model for the organization of cells with dynamic equations for the morphogen concentrations. Within this framework we discuss the scaling of morphogen profiles with tissue size. We introduce a growth rule which couples the decision to divide a cell with temporal changes of the cellular morphogen levels. We show that this growth rule can regulate growth in a self-organized way and compare the results to experimental data from the developing fly wing.