THE EMERGENT STRUCTURE OF THE DROSOPHILA WING A Dynamic Model Generator

Drosophila melanogaster is a model organism in genetics thanks to the compactness of its genome and its relative simplicity. Recently, certain developmental patterns in Drosophila have been studied by mathematical models, with the aim of gaining deeper and quantitative insight into the morphogenesis of this insect. There is a need for accurate dynamical of the epithelial cell structure and organization within the fly wing, to further the understanding of a phenomenon known as planar cell polarity. The present study tackles the problem of retrieving such a salient structure using classical tools of dynamical system theory embedded with network and graph concepts. On the one hand the goal is to provide a visual detection and representation of the cell packaging that is accurate and fine. Particular care is also put in obtaining a model of this structure, whose main features are the compactness and simplicity.