Forest structure in epigenetic landscapes

Abstract

Morphogenesis is the biological process that causes the emergence and changes of patterns (tissues and organs) in living organisms. It is a robust, self-organising mechanism, governed by Genetic Regulatory Networks (GRN), that hasn't been thoroughly understood. In this work we propose Epigenetic Forests as a tool to study morphogenesis and to extract valuable information from GRN. Our method unfolds the richness and structure within the GRN. As a case study, we analyze the GRN during cell fate determination during the early stages of development of the flower Arabidopsis thaliana and its spatial dynamics. By using a genetic algorithm we optimize cell differentiation in our model and correctly recover the architecture of the flower.