Unexpected role of noise in spine formation
Thursday, September 29, 2011 - 09:31
in Physics & Chemistry
The development of periodic structures in embryos giving rise to the formation of, e.g., spine segments, is controlled not by genes but by simple physical and chemical phenomena. Researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the University Pierre et Marie Curie have proposed a straightforward theoretical model to describe the process, and studied how the segmentation is affected by internal, thermodynamic noise of the system. The results turned out to be counterintuitive.