Abstract

Cellular-Fate decision making is the process by which cells can assume different functionally significant phenotypes. In many developmental processes, the choice of cell fate is often restricted to two phenotypes, with decision making being performed by gene regulatory networks of mutually inhibitory “teams” - each composed of drivers for a specific phenotype. However, in a few cases, a third team has been observed but such cases are quite rare. In this paper we use in-silico methods to study networks having 3 “teams”, we then compare and contrast such networks with networks having 2 “teams” which are more abundant in nature.
We show that phenotypes generated by three team networks are much less stable than those from two team networks, and are more sensitive to disturbance. Switching between pure phenotypes on three team networks also requires much stronger and more targeted perturbation. We further designed eigenvector-based algorithms to resolve teams, validated them using biological network data and analyzed how topological differences between two and three team networks affect team resolution accuracy.

Others

We recently presented a poster at the Physics of Cells and Tissues (PoCT 2024). Here’s the poster: