Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: The formation of a hollow cellular sphere is often one of the first steps of multicellular embryonic development. In the case of Hydra, the sphere breaks its initial symmetry to form a foot-head axis. During this process a gene, ks1, is increasingly expressed in localized cell domains whose size distribution becomes scale-free at the axis-locking moment. We show that a physical model based solely on the production and exchange of ks1-promoting factors among neighboring cells robustly reproduces the scaling behavior as well as the experimentally observed spontaneous and temperature-directed symmetry breaking.
Source: Physical Review Letters
Institutions: Politecnico di Torino, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Torino, National Interuniversity Consortium for the Physical Sciences of Matter, Candiolo Cancer Institute, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Napoli, University of Naples Federico II, Universitat de Barcelona, Saarland University
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1971576757