#35 · Systems biology

Minimal cues and cell contacts steer developmental fate in coarse-grained models

The common thread is how cell-cell and environmental inputs constrain developmental outcomes, examined through coarse-grained or minimal models. One preprint couples juxtacrine cell-cell interaction to a Waddington-style epigenetic landscape, reduced to a binary spin model with a free energy landscape. A second shows that sequential pulses of minimal signaling alphabets can steer hierarchical gene regulatory networks toward arbitrary cell fates. A third, mechanical rather than signaling-based, reports in a minimal growing visco-elasto-plastic rod model that remodeling trades shape complexity for reproducibility, and that growth resolves this trade-off. It connects to the others mainly through how developmental outcomes are constrained. What is new is the use of minimal signaling vocabularies, both as landscape couplings and as temporally sequenced pulses, to direct cell fate.