Modeling craniofacial development reveals spatiotemporal constraints on robust patterning of the mandibular arch

摘要

Author summary Proper development of the body requires boundaries to form between regions in which cells will form different structures, and these boundaries need to be properly organized in space. This must occur accurately even in moving, dividing cells and in the presence of the noise that is inherent in all biochemical processes. We use development of the upper and lower jaw as a model to study boundary formation. In this work, we combine detailed experimental measurements with computational modeling to investigate the role the timing of gene expression plays in organizing spatial boundaries, and find that the different orders of gene expression navigate a tradeoff between precision and accuracy in boundary positioning.