Systems biology of the Drosophila blastoderm: what can we learn?

John Reinitz, Stony Brook University

Abstract: This talk will be about the determination cell fates in a moprphogenetic field and the control of transcription in metazoan genes with large promoters. A morphogenetic field is a group of cells which interact to form the "blueprint" of a particular part of the body. In addition to the specification of body pattern at up to cellular resolution, morphogenetic fields have astonishing error correction properties. We consider both of these problems in the context of the blastoderm of the fruit fly Drosophila using experimental, mathematical, and computational tools. In order to connect this work directly to DNA sequence, we are also developing a new model of transcriptional control and show how it can be used to understand anomalous expression of even-skipped stripe 7 which is not driven from its classical enhancer.