A model of morphogen transport in the presence of glypicans III

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a two-dimensional morphogen transport model with glypicans, proving the existence and uniqueness of steady states, and demonstrates convergence to a one-dimensional model as the domain's height shrinks to zero.

Contribution

It establishes the existence, uniqueness, and dimension reduction of steady states in a coupled nonlinear elliptic PDE system modeling morphogen transport.

Findings

Unique steady state exists for all parameters.

Stationary solutions converge to a 1D model as height tends to zero.

Handling measure source terms is key to the analysis.

Abstract

We analyse a stationary problem for the two dimensional model of morphogen transport introduced by Hufnagel et al. The model consists of one linear elliptic PDE posed on $(-1,1)\times(0,h)$ which is coupled via a nonlinear boundary condition with a nonlinear elliptic PDE posed on $(-1,1)\times\{0\}$. The main result is that the system has a unique steady state for all ranges of parameters present in the system. Moreover we consider the problem of the dimension reduction. After introducing an appropriate scaling in the model we prove that, as $h\to0$, the stationary solution converges to the unique steady state of the one dimensional simplification of the model which was analysed in the first part of the paper. The main difficulty in obtaining appropriate estimates stems from the presence of a measure source term in the boundary condition.