Unexpected role of noise in spine formation
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 - 20:30
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 have now 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.