#37 · Systems biology

Tissue-wide planar cell polarity emerges from local signals in cellular Potts models

The dominant thread is computational modeling of how cell-level rules give rise to tissue-scale organization during development. Two items address planar cell polarity. One combines simulations of a PCP mathematical model with deep learning and statistical modeling to show that directional alignment among different cell types governs robustness. The other uses a cellular Potts model to show that tissue-wide polarity can arise without morphogens, through local boundary signals and small initial tissue size. The third item applies single-cell atlases and phenotype ontologies in C. elegans to test whether co-expressed developmental genes produce similar mutant phenotypes. What is new across these is the emphasis on cell-type heterogeneity and local interactions as determinants of organization. The set shares no direct lineage inference method; its link to single-cell data is the atlas-based analysis in the C. elegans study.