How many positioning chemicals are needed to achieve robust
positional specification?
11月27日（火）13：30〜 理学部3号館6階数理生物学セミナー室
(at Room 3631, 6th floor of building 3 of the Faculty of Sciences)
Normal development of multicellular organisms requires
cells to respond properly according to their positions. Positional
information is often provided to cells by chemical gradients. However,
the gradients vary among embryos caused by noise from various origins.
This variation would make positional information unreliable, which is a
serious problem for normal morphogenesis. In many developmental systems,
multiple chemical gradients are adopted to specify the spatial position
along a single axis, presumably to achieve a sufficiently high precision
of information. Here we examine the relationship between the precision
of positional specification and the number of positioning chemicals in a
general framework, which has never been formulated before. According to
the formula derived in this study, we can predict a minimum number of
chemical species needed to achieve a given precision of positional
information. Our results are applicable to developmental processes of
wide species, and will shed light on the design for robust morphogenesis.
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