Combination of Chemotaxis and Differential Adhesion Leads to Robust Cell Sorting During Tissue Patterning

Abstract

Robust tissue patterning is crucial to many processes during development. The “French Flag” model of patterning by instructive morphogen concentrations has been the most widely proposed model for tissue patterning. However, recently, cell sorting has been found to be an alternative model. In this article, we used computational modeling to show that two mechanisms, namely chemotaxis and differential adhesion, are needed for robust cell sorting. We assessed the performance of each of the two mechanisms by quantifying the fraction of correct sorting, the fraction of stable clusters after correct sorting, time taken for correct sorting and the size variations of the cells having different fates. We found that chemotaxis and differential adhesion confer different advantages to the sorting process. Chemotaxis leads to high fraction of correct sorting whereas differential adhesion leads to high fraction of stable clusters. A combination of both chemotaxis and differential adhesion yields cell sorting that is both accurate and robust. Thus, we propose that both mechanisms are used for cell sorting during tissue patterning in development.