Speaker
Description
The emergence of developmentally regulated life cycles, coordinating cellular growth with multicellular reproduction, was a key step in the evolution of complex multicellularity. Yet how cells use local information to regulate fragmentation in growing multicellular groups, and how these processes depend on spatial structure, remains unclear.
Here, we introduce a computational dynamical-network model that tracks how cellular information is generated and propagated during multicellular growth. Starting from a single cell, clusters grow as dynamical networks embedded in spatial lattices representing one-dimensional filaments, two-dimensional hexagonal lattices, and three-dimensional face-centered cubic structures. We store information for each cell, such as cell age, physical stress, and the last reproduction time, which we use to trigger fragmentation events.
We find that dimensionality strongly shapes the regulation of multicellular life cycles. In one-dimensional filaments, fragmentation rules can achieve any target size. However, clusters in two- and three-dimensional spaces do not stabilize at the target size but instead maintain the target mean. Our results also reveal characteristic life-cycle patterns that emerge across dimensions. Furthermore, spatial constraints in higher dimensions limit the smallest achievable mean group size, creating new challenges for the evolution of regulated multicellular life cycles.
