Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 30: Posters II
DY 30.7: Poster
Thursday, March 25, 2010, 16:00–18:00, Poster C
Morphogenesis by coupled regulatory networks: Reliable control of positional information and proportion regulation — •Thimo Rohlf1,2 and Stefan Bornholdt3 — 1Programme d'Epigenomique, Genopole Campus 1 - Genavenir 6, 5 rue Henri Desbruères, F-91030 Évry, France — 2MPI -MIS, Inselstrasse 22, D-04013 Leipzig, Germany — 3Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Bremen, Otto-Hahn-Allee, D-28334 Bremen, Germany
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 multicellular organism [1]. As an example we study the developmental problems of domain formation and proportion regulation in the presence of noise, as well as in the presence of cell flow. We find that networks that solve this task exhibit a hierarchical structure of information processing and are of similar complexity as developmental circuits of living cells. Proportion regulation is scalable with system size and leads to sharp, precisely localized boundaries of gene expression domains, even for large numbers of cells. A detailed analysis of noise-induced dynamics, using a mean-field approximation, shows that noise in gene expression states stabilizes (rather than disrupts) the spatial pattern in the presence of cell movements, both for stationary as well as growing systems. Finally, we discuss how this mechanism could be realized in the highly dynamic environment of growing tissues.
[1] T.R. and S.B., J. Theor. Biol., 2009, 261, 176-193