Scaling and patterning in Drosophila developing wing

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

Conferencia; Latin American Society for Developmental Biology (LASDB) meeting 2019; 2019

In the developing wing of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster (called imaginal wing disc), wing cell fate is defined by the expression of the selector gene vestigial (vg). The size of the Vg domain is determined by two mechanisms: 1) proliferation of Vg expressing cells near the dorsal-ventral boundary of the wing disc, 2) cell to cell propagation of the Vg pattern (a process known as recruitment). Nevertheless, the spatiotemporal contribution of recruitment to the final size of the wing has not yet been carefully studied. In this study, we quantitatively examine Vg expression along the dorsal-ventral (DV) axis in the wing disc and find that the Vg pattern overscales (i.e., it expands more than predicted by tissue size). To investigate the relevance of cell proliferation and cell recruitment in the observed phenotype we implemented both mechanisms in a computational Cellular Potts Model. The agreement between our experimental data and the modeling results suggests that the proposed recruitment mechanism could, at least in part, explain the spatio-temporal pattern of Vg concentration. We further investigate under what conditions our computational model predicts other scenarios in which scaling or even underscaling could be observed.