Abdoulaye Sarr, Alexandra Fronville and Vincent Rodin.
A directional cellular dynamic under the control of a diffusing energy for tissue morphogenesis: phenotype and genotype.
In Emerging Trends in Applications and Infrastructures for Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and Systems Biology, Elsevier, chapter 2, pages 17-35, April 2016.
Abstract:
We present a new approach to understand shape emergence in a multicellular system. We set the hypothesis that beyond the influence of mechanical forces and gene expression, spatial constraints applied to the cells over time play a key role, mainly at the early stage of the embryo. In our model, cells are elements of a 2D cellular automaton-oriented multiagent system. To achieve a specific shape, they read actions within a genetic program according to the current timestep and logical constraints. This model has been used to generate effectively all possible tissue phenotypes (shapes) at any stage of the early embryo and their associated genotypes (genetic programs). We also build a model that couples the morphological equation governing the growth of the phenotypes with differential equations that diffuse energy in the system. This model has been used to do some pattern predictions, to define properties on tissues for the purpose of classification, and to simulate responses to therapy in the case of pathological tissues.
Keywords: Developmental systems, Mathematical biology, Viability theory, Energy budget, Computational morphogenesis, Phenotype-genotype.
[ doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-804203-8.00002-X] [Sarr16b.pdf]

---