Abstract Submitted for the Mar15 Meeting of the American Physical Society Signaling Delays Preclude Defects in Lateral Inhibition Pattern

Submitted for the MAR15 Meeting of The American Physical Society Signaling Delays Preclude Defects in Lateral Inhibition Patterning INGMAR RIEDEL-KRUSE, DAVID GLASS, XIAOFAN JIN, Stanford University, Bioengineering — Developmental biology is extraordinarily robust in its ability to self-organize spatiotemporal patterns despite an intrinsically noisy set of parts. Lateral inhibition is a classic example of a mechanism behind such precise emergent behavior. However, the models through which we understand lateral inhibition’s capabilities usually assume that cells signal to one another without delay, a supposedly minor source of error at most. Here we explicitly investigate the effects of signaling delays as well as their relation to cis-interactions in lateral inhibition patterning. We reduce the patterning problem effectively to a two-parameter phase space (signaling delay and coupling strength), and we found that rather than being a source of error, signaling delays enable significant decrease of error rates. Together with cis-interactions, these delays lead to patterning that can be both fast and robust to noise and parameter variation. This suggests that overlooking time delays in developmental signaling does not just ignore a potential source of error, but rather ignores a knob with which evolution may tune patterning robustness in general. Ingmar Riedel-Kruse Stanford University, Bioengineering Date submitted: 17 Nov 2014 Electronic form version 1.4