Regensburg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 24: Systems Biology, Gene Expression, Signalling
BP 24.4: Vortrag
Donnerstag, 8. September 2022, 11:45–12:00, H16
Rationalizing the optimality of the Drosophila gap gene system by ab-initio derivation of optimal solutions for morphogenetic patterns — •Thomas R. Sokolowski1,2, Thomas Gregor3,4, William Bialek3, and Gašper Tkačik1 — 1IST Austria, Am Campus 1, A-4300 Klosterneuburg, Austria — 2Present Address: Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Ruth-Moufang-Str. 1, D-60438 Frankfurt, Germany — 3Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, U.S.A. — 4Insitut Pasteur, Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, 25 Rue du Dr. Roux, F-75015, Paris, France
Early fruit fly development is outstandingly precise in spite of the high level of stochasticity in the underlying biochemical processes. While the gap gene system driving fly embryo patterning has been shown to encode positional information optimally, the precise mechanisms that enable this remain elusive. We show that optimal solutions for the gap gene regulatory network can be obtained by optimizing a biophysically realistic spatial-stochastic embryo model, without inferring from data. Firstly, our predictions mechanistically explain how the observed developmental precision can be attained. Secondly, by exploring rich sets of optimal solutions, we elucidate the role of key components controlling early fly patterning. To our knowledge our work provides the first successful ab-initio derivation of a nontrivial biological network in a biophysically realistic setting. Our results suggest that even though real biological networks are hard to intuit, they may represent optimal solutions to optimization problems which evolution can find.