Neighborhood-Informed Positional Information for Precise Cell Identity Specification

ABSTRACT: During development cells reliably establish their identities, a process that is enabled in part by positional information encoded in gene expression patterns. Previous works showed that cells in Drosophila embryos can utilize this information to decode their position along the anterior-posterior axis with a 1% embryo-length positional precision. However, this precision is insufficient to uniquely determine position, leading to a positional information gap. Here, we propose a neighborhood-informed information-theoretic framework which allows to quantitatively estimate the amount of information regarding position which exists in the microenvironment of each cell. We formulate how much additional information exists in neighboring cells as a function of spatial variation in gene expression. We

SUBMITTER: Michal Erez 

PROVIDER: S-SCDT-10_1038-S44320-026-00211-Y | biostudies-other |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other