Dresden 2014 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 26: Multi-cellular systems and Physics of Cancer

BP 26.3: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 2. April 2014, 12:15–12:30, ZEU 250

Size control on the fly ocellar complex pattern — •Daniel Aguilar-Hidalgo¹, David Becerra-Alonso², María Carmen Lemos³, Antonio Córdoba³, and Fernando Casares⁴ — ¹Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany. — ²Dept. Engineering and Mathematics - Univ. Loyola Andalucía, Sevilla, Spain. — ³Dept. Condense Matter Physics - Univ. de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain. — ⁴CABD (CSIC-UPO), Sevilla, Spain.

During development, organs grow until reaching a specific size. Different species show distinct organ sizes maintaining functionality. We are studying the organ growth scalability in the D. melanogaster ocellar complex. It comprises three simple eyes, or ocelli, located at the vertices of a triangular patch of cuticle on the fly’s forehead. This pattern sets the specification of two mutually alternative cell fates: (1) interocellar cuticle flanked by two (2) ocelli. We developed a mathematical and computational model as a gene regulatory network (GRN) that describe the qualitative aspects of the patterning and predicts several of its properties [1]. In nature, different fly species show different size distribution of the ocellar complex constituents. Is the same GRN able to generate different size distributions? We found that randomized parametric sets show not random but structured size distributions. A study of this distribution on several fly species show the same structure as predicted by the model. This suggests that the same GRN defines different sizes for the ocellar complex, and that the system constrains the possible distribution results, avoiding non-functional structures.

[1] Aguilar-Hidalgo et al. Development, (2013) 140 (1), 82-92.