Title: Exploring controlled shooting strategies of cell lineage in organ size control
Abstract: How organs achieve their final sizes is one of the most fascinating unsolved problems in biology. It is not only fundamental in the research of development, but also associated with many diseases and medical opportunities. This problem seems to be big but can be dealt from the perspective of cell lineage. Feedback controls play important roles to balance cell proliferation and differentiation in order to give rise to the correct cell lineages. However, the problem of scaling arises. The range of signals used by cells are usually too small compared with the scale of organs. A better control strategy has to be used and more complicated feedback structures should be exploited. We proposed an idea of “controlled shooting”: the control in early stage can assure the perfect results of later stages. The olfactory epithelium (OE) of mice is used as a model system because the structure is well defined and easy to work with. We have developed tools to measure the rate of cell division and other parameters of OE development. We identified markers for specific cell types within the cell lineage to gain a better understanding of OE development. We’ll also use mathematical models to explore plausible hypotheses and validate the models with suitable perturbations in biological model systems.