Dresden 2020 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 23: Focus: Physics of Stem Cells
BP 23.6: Talk
Wednesday, March 18, 2020, 11:45–12:00, ZEU 250
Embryo segmentation by stem cells with genetic clocks and timers. — •Jose Negrete Jr1,2, Laurel A Rohde1, Arianne Bercowsky-Rama1, Alfonso Martinez-Arias3, Frank Jülicher2, and Andrew C Oates1 — 1École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland — 2Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany — 3University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Spatial gene expression patterns define regions where specialized cells emerge within an embryo. Patterning may arise from cell signaling, as in lateral induction/inhibition, or from single cells containing genetic timers, as observed in the daughters of neuroblasts. Here, we study the dynamics of the segmentation clock in zebrafish embryos. We show that isolated stem cells extracted from embryos are able to recapitulate the same behavior as in vivo. Their behavior is consistent with a theoretical model of a noisy genetic timer driving a downstream noisy genetic oscillator. Finally, we show that a spatiotemporal model of sequentially activated genetic timers and oscillators is able to reproduce the dynamics of embryo segmentation under different perturbations. This shows that patterning by the segmentation clock proceeds from a mixture of cell signaling and genetic timers.