Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Universitá degli Studi di Perugia, Perugia 06123, Italia.
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare - Sezione di Perugia, Perugia 06123, Italia.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Oct 17;120(42):e2309616120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2309616120. Epub 2023 Oct 12.
Biological patterns that emerge during the morphogenesis of multicellular organisms can display high precision at large scales, while at cellular scales, cells exhibit large fluctuations stemming from cell-cell differences in molecular copy numbers also called demographic noise. We study the conflicting interplay between high precision and demographic noise in trichome patterns on the epidermis of wild-type leaves, as a two-dimensional model system. We carry out a statistical characterization of these patterns and show that their power spectra display fat tails-a signature compatible with noise-driven stochastic Turing patterns-which are absent in power spectra of patterns driven by deterministic instabilities. We then present a theoretical model that includes demographic noise stemming from birth-death processes of genetic regulators which we study analytically and by stochastic simulations. The model captures the observed experimental features of trichome patterns.
在多细胞生物形态发生过程中出现的生物模式可以在大尺度上表现出高精度，而在细胞尺度上，由于细胞间分子拷贝数的差异（也称为人口噪声），细胞表现出较大的波动。我们以野生型叶片表皮上的刚毛模式为二维模型系统，研究了高精度和人口噪声之间的冲突相互作用。我们对这些模式进行了统计特征描述，结果表明它们的功率谱显示出胖尾——这与噪声驱动的随机图灵模式一致，而在由确定性不稳定性驱动的模式的功率谱中则不存在。然后，我们提出了一个包含由遗传调节剂的生死过程引起的人口噪声的理论模型，我们通过分析和随机模拟对其进行了研究。该模型捕获了刚毛模式的观察到的实验特征。
