Bayesian Reconstruction of Tissue Deformation Maps for Organ Morphogenesis

Abstract

The question of how the organ-specific morphology is determined is one of the unsolved important issues in biology. Sor far, molecular biological studies have identified key genes for organ morphogenesis, but many of the physical processes on cell and tissue dynamics remain unknown. One of the reasons is that high-resolution measurement of cell/tissue dynamics is impossible even with the most advanced microscopes, except for limited tissues and species. In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian model for reconstructing deformation maps of curved epithelial tissues from low-resolution data on cell trajectories during organ development. After explaining the basic idea of modeling, we apply this method to the measurement data of chick early forebrain development, and show the validity of the method.