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SYED: Symposium Physics of Embryonic Development Across Scales: From DNA to Organisms

SYED 1: Physics of Embryonic Development Across Scales: From DNA to Organisms

SYED 1.3: Invited Talk

Monday, March 17, 2025, 10:30–11:00, H1

Building quantitative dynamical landscapes of developmental cell fate decisions — •David Rand — University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK

I will discuss the dynamics of decision-making in the early embryo. As cells proliferate and assemble into tissues, their molecular identity changes in discrete step-like transitions to produce diverging sequences of distinct cell states that culminate in the differentiation of specific functional cell types. Hence, cellular development can be viewed as sets of branching cell lineages generating increasing diversity and comprising increasingly specialised cell types. I will outline an approach to understanding this that relies on geometry and dynamics, and I will illustrate this with recent work on the early development of the nervous system. New methods for the analysis of single-cell temporal data combined with ideas from dynamical systems can be used to deduce the topology of the branching network, the dynamical nature of the branching transitions and a quantitative model of the underlying dynamics that reproduces the data.

Keywords: cellular decision-making; development; dynamical systems; bifurcations; gene network