Critical growth of cerebral tissue in organoids: theory and experiments

Abstract

We develop a Fokker-Planck theory of tissue growth with three types of cells (symmetrically dividing, asymmetrically dividing and non-dividing) as main agents to study the growth dynamics of human cerebral organoids. Fitting the theory to lineage tracing data obtained in next generation sequencing experiments, we show that the growth of cerebral organoids is a critical process. We derive analytical expressions describing the time evolution of clonal lineage sizes and show how power-law distributions arise in the limit of long times due to the vanishing of a characteristic growth scale. We discuss that the independence of critical growth on initial conditions could be biologically advantageous.