Modeling of gene regulative networks in developmental systems

On their way from a fertilized egg to a fully grown organism, higher organisms run through a series of developmental stages. This development can be seen as a program that is stored in the genome of the organism and the execution of this program is determined by the genes regulating each other`s activities. Up to now, the exact mechanisms for turning a one-dimensional genome into a fully three-dimensional organism remain hidden. Investigating the underlying processes, developmental biologists try to unveil these mechanisms but developmental systems constitute a difficult body of research: the regulative processes tend to be non-linear and commonly involve several genes simultaneously. At the same time, advances to register these processes experimentally are hampered by the fact that they not only depend on local information like a single cell`s state at a given point in time but on spatial aspects as well, i. e., other cell`s states. In result, the spatial component complicates experimental data acquisition in suitable resolution and the non-linearity of the regulative processes hampers intuitive interpretation of the available data. To aid data interpretation, mathematical models have become one of the key tools. They provide possibilities to formalize current knowledge, to validate hypotheses, and to assist in designing new experiments.