A Model for Drosophila Melanogaster Development from a Single Cell to Stripe Pattern Formation

The development of multicellular organisms, from the early forms of zygote, involves a range of phenomena that control cell growth and differentiation, making the overall process of morphogenesis highly complex. A well studied example of such a huge phenomenon is given by Drosophila Melanogaster morphogenesis that has been object of several models, whose main goal was to investigate the mechanisms involved in the spatial and temporal evolution of the patterning process. They have been identified in gene regulatory network, morphogen diffusion, synthesis and degradation.
In this paper we present a model of Drosophila development that considers also nuclear division and movements as basic morphogenetic mechanisms. The model is run on top of a prototype simulator which is based on a variation of an existing SSA (Stochastic Simulation Algorithm), tailored to the specific features of embryo development, including dynamicity of compartment network topology.