Recruitment shapes the spatio-temporal distribution of the Vestigial domain in Drosophila wing disc

CHARA, OSVALDO; NAHMAD BENSUSAN, MARCOS ; MUÑOZ NAVA, LUIS MANUEL; NAHMAD BENSUSAN, MARCOS ; ALVAREZ, H. ARIEL; MUÑOZ NAVA, LUIS MANUEL; ALVAREZ, H. ARIEL; CHARA, OSVALDO

Ciudad de México

Conferencia; 1st Latin American Workshop and Conference on Systems Biology; 2017

How patterns that determine cell fates get established is a fundamental problem in developmental biology. In the developing wing of Drosophila melanogaster, the wing fate is defined by the expression of the selector gene vestigial (vg). The size of the Vg domain is determined by two mechanisms. First, through proliferation of Vgexpressing cells near the dorsal-ventral boundary of the wing disc, and second, through the propagation of the Vg pattern to neighboring cells by a process known as recruitment. However, the spatiotemporal contributions of these mechanisms to the final size of the wing have not yet been carefully examined. We quantitatively measured the spatial pattern of Vg at different times during wing disc development and show that it is expressed in a gradient with increasing width. Interestingly, the Vg pattern changes of size and shape in a very specific window of time, suggesting that the contribution of recruitment is spatially and temporally controlled. To mechanistically interpret these results, we developed a Cellular Potts Model of a growing tissue where the Vg concentration expressed in each cell is assumed as a function of its difference with the neighboring cells and encoded by an Ordinary Differential Equation.The agreement between the experimental data and the modeling results herepresented suggests that the proposed recruitment mechanism could, at least in part,explain the spatio-temporal distribution of Vg.