Quantification of cellular contributions to multi-cellular pattern formation

Multi-cellular pattern formation is a key process in organism development, regeneration, and disease. Such multi-cellular patterns include, for instance, cell density and gene expression patterns. Here, we develop a cell-track-based method that quantifies how much individual cellular processes contribute to the emergence of large-scale patterns. These cellular processes include changes in cellular expression levels, cell motion, cell divisions, and apoptosis. We validate our method using synthetic data, before demonstrating it on two sets of experimental data. Our method is purely geometric and does not require any mechanistic assumptions about the underlying pattern-forming processes, making it very generic and robust. It thus enables unbiased, data-driven study of the mechanisms driving pattern formation across a broad class of systems.