11 March 2022
James Briscoe & Meritxell Sáez
Francis Crick Institute
London
The generation of cellular diversity during development involves differentiating cells transitioning between discrete cell states. In the 1940s, Conrad Waddington introduced a landscape metaphor to describe this process. The developmental path of a cell was pictured as a ball rolling through a terrain of branching valleys with cell fate decisions represented by the branch points at which the ball decides between one of two available valleys. We will discuss progress in constructing quantitative dynamical models inspired by this view of cellular differentiation. We have developed a framework based on Catastrophe Theory and dynamical systems methods that provides the foundations for quantitative geometric models of cellular differentiation. These models can be fit to experimental data and used to make quantitative predictions about cellular differentiation. The theory indicates that cell fate decisions can be described by a small number of decision structures. We discuss the biological relevance of this and suggest the approach is broadly applicable for the quantitative analysis of differentiation dynamics and for determining principles of developmental decisions.