Howard Martin, ten Wolde Pieter Rein
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom.
Phys Rev Lett. 2005 Nov 11;95(20):208103. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.208103. Epub 2005 Nov 9.
We investigate a mechanism for the robust identification of the center of a developing biological system. We assume the existence of two morphogen gradients, an activator emanating from the anterior, and a corepressor from the posterior. The corepressor inhibits the action of the activator in switching on target genes. We apply this system to Drosophila embryos, where we predict the existence of a hitherto undetected posterior corepressor. Using mathematical modeling, we show that a symmetric activator-corepressor model can quantitatively explain the precise midembryo expression boundary of the hunchback gene, and the scaling of this pattern with embryo size.
我们研究了一种用于稳健识别发育中的生物系统中心的机制。我们假设存在两种形态发生素梯度，一种是从前部发出的激活剂，另一种是从后部发出的共抑制因子。共抑制因子在开启靶基因时抑制激活剂的作用。我们将这个系统应用于果蝇胚胎，预测存在一种迄今未被检测到的后部共抑制因子。通过数学建模，我们表明对称的激活剂 - 共抑制因子模型可以定量解释驼背基因精确的胚胎中部表达边界，以及这种模式随胚胎大小的缩放情况。
