The multicellular incoherent feedforward loop motif generates spatial patterns

Abstract

The multicellular incoherent feedforward loop (mIFFL) is an extension of the traditional intracellular IFFL gene motif where the interacting nodes no longer need to be genes inside the same cell but can be spatially distributed in different cells. We studied for the first time the spatial computing abilities of these mIFFL through in silico simulations done with individual-based models (run in Morpheus and GRO software). We observed that: 1) a genetic circuit working as a mIFFL can behaves as an edge detector of the border of an infection, and 2) a mIFFL can be the inner mechanism generating the complex 7 stripe pattern of eve in D. melanogaster embryogenesis. So, in this work, we show that multicellular IFFL architectures can produce spatial patterns and are a promising spatial computing motif that deserves to be incorporated into the toolbox of pattern generation and multicellular coordination mechanisms. This study opens several future lines of research: multi-agent IFFL applied in ecology as a tool to predict spatial position of interacting animals or in distributed robotics.