Speaker
Description
Morphogens are intercellular signalling molecules that provide spatial information to cells in developing tissues by establishing long-range concentration gradients. Measurements of morphogen diffusivity vary considerably depending on the experimental approach, and these discrepancies have been used to question diffusion as a viable mechanism for morphogen gradient formation. Using particle-based modelling on realistic zebrafish brain images, we demonstrate that incorporating local tissue architecture together with receptor binding is sufficient to reproduce experimentally observed morphogen dynamics measured by FRAP and FCS. Our model recapitulates a range of biological observations such as generating two distinct particle populations with slow and fast diffusion coefficients, as reported in vivo. We further show how interactions between these populations contribute to setting the length scale of the concentration gradient, and how differences in experimental measurements can arise from the complex dynamics of hindered diffusion-driven transport.
