Abstract
Background
Developmental patterning is highly reproducible and accurate at the single-cell level during fly embryogenesis despite the gene expression noise and external perturbations such as the variation of the embryo length, temperature and genes. To reveal the underlying mechanism, it is very important to characterize the noise transmission during the dynamic pattern formation. Two hypotheses have been proposed. The “channel” scenario requires a highly reproducible input and an accurate interpretation by downstream genes. In contrast, the “filter” scenario proposes a noisy input and a noise filter via the cross-regulation of the downstream network. It has been under great debates which scenario the fly embryogenesis follows.
Results
The first 3-h developmental patterning of fly embryos is orchestrated by a hierarchical segmentation gene network, which rewires upon the maternal to zygotic transition. Starting from the highly reproducible maternal gradients, the positional information is refined to the single-cell precision through the highly dynamical evolved zygotic gene expression profiles. Thus the fly embryo development might strictly fit into neither the originally proposed “filter” nor “channel” scenario. The controversy that which scenario the fly embryogenesis follows could be further clarified by combining quantitative measurements and modeling.
Conclusions
Fly embryos have become one of the perfect model systems for quantitative systems biology studies. The underlying mechanism discovered from fly embryogenesis will deepen our understanding of the noise control of the gene network, facilitate searching for more efficient and safer methods for cell programming and reprogramming, and have the great potential for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful for the two reviewers for helpful suggestions. We apologize to our colleagues whose work could not be cited due to the page limits. This project is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.31670852) and 100-talent plan of Peking University. The Drosophila lab used in this project is supported by Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences.
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Author summary: It is intriguing how the development of organisms is highly reproducible and accurate despite the external and internal noise. The key to solve this mystery is to explore the noise transmission during development and discover the underlying mechanism. The developmental system could generate precise inputs and outputs in each step, or gradually generate a final precise output by filtering a noisy input according to the “channel” or “filter” scenario, respectively. The quantitative studies on the early development of the fruit fly’s embryos show that the developmental process is highly dynamic and its noise transmission may employ a hybridized strategy.
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Yang, Z., Wu, X., Yang, N. et al. Noise transmission during the dynamic pattern formation in fly embryos. Quant Biol 6, 15–29 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40484-018-0135-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40484-018-0135-8