ArticlePRX life
Finding the last bits of positional information.
Article in PRX life. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Neighborhood-informed positional information for precise cell identity specification.Molecular systems biology · 2026Article
- Positional information and information flows in dynamic tissues.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Characterizing the regulatory logic of transcriptional control at the DNA sequence level by ensembles of thermodynamic models.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Dynamical systems of fate and form in development.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2025Review
- Optimization and variability can coexist.ArXiv · 2025Article
- Stochastic morphological swings inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Quantifying the genetic origins of body plan scaling.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Scale invariance in early embryonic development.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Limits on inferring T cell specificity from partial information.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Scale invariance in early embryonic development.ArXiv · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In a developing embryo, information about the position of cells is encoded in the concentrations of morphogen molecules. In the fruit fly, the local concentrations of just a handful of proteins encoded by the gap genes are sufficient to specify position with a precision comparable to the spacing between cells along the anterior-posterior axis. This matches the precision of downstream events such as the striped patterns of expression in the pair-rule genes, but is not quite sufficient to define unique identities for individual cells. We demonstrate theoretically that this information gap can be bridged if positional errors are spatially correlated, with correlation lengths ~ 20% of the embryo length. We then show experimentally that these correlations are present, with the required strength, in the fluctuating positions of the pair-rule stripes, and this can be traced back to the gap genes. Taking account of these correlations, the available information matches the information needed for unique cellular specification, within error bars of ~ 2%. These observation support a precisionist view of information flow through the underlying genetic networks, in which accurate signals are available from the start and preserved as they are transformed into the final spatial patterns.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.