Abstract

The central nervous system develops from the neural plate, which folds into the neural tube. Subsequently, morphogen gradients define distinct neural progenitor domains along the dorsal-ventral axis, which give rise to the central nervous system. In my talk, I will present recent work from the group that addressed the folding mechanism of the neural tube [1], and that showed that the gradient-based patterning is much more precise than previously thought [2]. With the help of cell-based modelling, we further found that high patterning precision requires small cell diameters, pointing to the long-elusive evolutionary driving force behind the emergence of pseudostratified epithelia [3,4]. Finally, I will discuss the biophysical constraints that define the complex shape of cells in pseudostratified epithelia [5-8], and present our recently developed 3D simulation framework for the data-driven simulation of epithelial cell dynamics.