ArticleDevelopment (Cambridge, England)2023
The impact of cell size on morphogen gradient precision.
Article in Development (Cambridge, England), 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- MorphoGrad: A MATLAB toolbox for simulating steady-state morphogen gradients under cell-to-cell variability.STAR protocols · 2026Article
- Position-dependent feedback drives scaling and robustness of morphogen gradients.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Coping with uncertainty: Challenges for robust pattern formation in dynamical tissues.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2025Review
- Dynamical systems of fate and form in development.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2025Review
- Timely neurogenesis drives the transition from nematic to crystalline nuclear packing during retinal morphogenesis.Science advances · 2025Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Tissue patterning during embryonic development is remarkably precise. Here, we numerically determine the impact of the cell diameter, gradient length and the morphogen source on the variability of morphogen gradients. We show that the positional error increases with the gradient length relative to the size of the morphogen source, and with the square root of the cell diameter and the readout position. We provide theoretical explanations for these relationships, and show that they enable high patterning precision over developmental time for readouts that scale with expanding tissue domains, as observed in the Drosophila wing disc. Our analysis suggests that epithelial tissues generally achieve higher patterning precision with small cross-sectional cell areas. An extensive survey of measured apical cell areas shows that they are indeed small in developing tissues that are patterned by morphogen gradients. Enhanced precision may thus have led to the emergence of pseudostratification in epithelia, a phenomenon for which the evolutionary benefit had so far remained elusive.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.