A new study reveals that communication between cells encasing the developing fruit fly egg chamber induces unequal cell division, shedding light on a fundamental biological process.
In a burning forest, fire moves quickly but unevenly, destroying entire sections of forest while leaving others untouched. A similar phenomenon occurs with a fast-moving viral infection as it spreads through a community, devastating some households while sparing others. In certain biological systems, yet another pattern of unequal spread occurs. This inequality, called clonal dominance, occurs when some cells multiply in greater numbers than others. The result is that most descendants will be derived from just a small portion of founding cells. Increasingly observed by researchers in recent years, clonal dominance is seen as key to unraveling many mysteries of developmental biology. And now, a team of computational biologists has developed a mathematical model that explains the mechanism by which clonal dominance can arise in the fruit fly’s egg chamber, where dividing cells are able to induce some — and only some — of their neighboring cells to divide. They report their findings in the November issue of Nature Physics.
“The founding clusters of cells expanded in numbers unequally, …