School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK.
Mol Plant. 2019 Jun 3;12(6):731-742. doi: 10.1016/j.molp.2019.02.004. Epub 2019 Feb 20.
Organ function is at least partially shaped and constrained by the organization of their constituent cells. Extensive investigation has revealed mechanisms explaining how these patterns are generated, with less being known about their functional relevance. In this paper, a methodology to discretize and quantitatively analyze cellular patterning is described. By performing global organ-scale cellular interaction mapping, the organization of cells can be extracted and analyzed using network science. This provides a means to take the developmental analysis of cellular organization in complex organisms beyond qualitative descriptions and provides data-driven approaches to inferring cellular function. The bridging of a structure-function relationship in hypocotyl epidermal cell patterning through global topological analysis provides support for this approach. The analysis of cellular topologies from patterning mutants further enables the contribution of gene activity toward the organizational properties of tissues to be linked, bridging molecular and tissue scales. This systems-based approach to investigate multicellular complexity paves the way to uncovering the principles of complex organ design and achieving predictive genotype-phenotype mapping.
器官功能至少部分由其组成细胞的组织方式决定和约束。大量研究已经揭示了解释这些模式如何产生的机制，但对其功能相关性知之甚少。本文描述了一种离散化和定量分析细胞模式的方法。通过进行全局器官尺度的细胞相互作用映射，可以提取和分析细胞的组织方式，并使用网络科学进行分析。这为复杂生物中细胞组织的发育分析提供了一种超越定性描述的方法，并为推断细胞功能提供了数据驱动的方法。通过全局拓扑分析，在胚轴表皮细胞模式形成中架起了结构-功能关系的桥梁，为这种方法提供了支持。对模式形成突变体的细胞拓扑结构的分析，进一步使得基因活性对组织组织特性的贡献能够联系起来，从而连接分子和组织尺度。这种基于系统的方法来研究多细胞复杂性为揭示复杂器官设计的原理和实现预测基因型-表型映射铺平了道路。
