Morphogen gradients are well known to play several important roles in development; however the mechanisms underlying the formation and maintenance of these gradients are often not well understood. In this work, we investigate whether the presence of a secondary morphogen can increase the robustness of the primary morphogen gradient to perturbation, thereby providing a more stable mechanism for ...

The Drosophila blastoderm and the vertebrate neural tube are archetypal examples of morphogen-patterned tissues that create precise spatial patterns of different cell types. In both tissues, pattern formation is dependent on molecular gradients that emanate from opposite poles. Despite distinct evolutionary origins and differences in time scales, cell biology and molecular players, both tissues...

How cells in developing organisms interpret the quantitative information contained in morphogen gradients is an open question. Here we address this question using a novel integrative approach that combines quantitative measurements of morphogen-induced gene expression at single-mRNA resolution with mathematical modelling of the induction process. We focus on the induction of Notch ligands by th...

Morphogens are signaling molecules that are secreted by a localized source and spread in a target tissue where they are involved in the regulation of growth and patterning. Both the activity of morphogenetic signaling and the kinetics of ligand spreading in a tissue depend on endocytosis and intracellular trafficking. Here, we review quantitative approaches to study how large-scale morphogen pr...

Some aspects of pattern formation in developing embryos can be described by nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations. An important class of these models accounts for diffusion and degradation of a locally produced single chemical species. At long times, solutions of such models approach a steady state in which the concentration decays with distance from the source of production. We present analyt...

Successful biological development via spatial and temporal regulations of cell differentiation relies on the action of multiple signaling molecules that are known as morphogens. It is now well established that biological signaling molecules create nonuniform concentration profiles, called morphogen gradients, that activate different genes, leading to patterning in the developing organisms. The ...