Scientists now introduce a mathematical framework that analyzes self-organization from a single cell to a multicellular organism.
When an embryo develops, many types of cells with different functions need to be generated. For example, some cells will become part of the eye and record visual stimuli, while others will be part of the gut and help digest food. To determine their roles, cells are constantly communicating with each other using chemical signals.
David Brückner and Gašper Tkačik from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria have now established a mathematical framework that helps analyze this process and predict its optimal parameters. Published in PNAS, this approach represents a unifying mathematical language to describe biological self-organization in embryonic development and beyond.
Although the framework has proven to be successful on three different developmental models that all rely on chemical and mechanical signaling, additional work will be required to apply it to experimental recordings of developmental systems."In the future, we want to study more complex models with more parameters and dimensions," Tkačik says.