Growth Based Morphogenesis of Vertebrate Limb Bud

Many genes and their regulatory relationships are involved in developmental phenomena. However, by chemical information alone, we cannot fully understand changing organ morphologies through tissue growth because deformation and growth of the organ are essentially mechanical processes. Here, we develop a mathematical model to describe the change of organ morphologies through cell proliferation. Our basic idea is that the proper specification of localized volume source (e.g., cell proliferation) is able to guide organ morphogenesis, and that the specification is given by chemical gradients. We call this idea “growth-based morphogenesis.” We find that this morphogenetic mechanism works if the tissue is elastic for small deformation and plastic for large deformation. To illustrate our concept, we study the development of vertebrate limb buds, in which a limb bud protrudes from a flat lateral plate and extends distally in a self-organized manner. We show how the proportion of limb bud shape depends on different parameters and also show the conditions needed for normal morphogenesis, which can explain abnormal morphology of some mutants. We believe that the ideas shown in the present paper are useful for the morphogenesis of other organs

Sperm Motility and Multiciliary Beating: An Integrative Mechanical Model

AbstractThe motility of sperm flagella and cilia are based on a common axonemal structure. In this article, we describe a fluid-mechanical model for the ciliary and sperm axoneme. This fluid-mechanical model, based on the immersed boundary method, couples the internal force generation of dynein molecular motors through the passive elastic axonemal structure with the external fluid mechanics governed by the Navier-Stokes equations. We show recent numerical simulation results for sperm motility and multiciliary interaction