The Role of Cytonemes and Diffusive Transport in the Establishment of Morphogen Gradients

TL;DR

This paper explores how diffusion and cytonemes contribute to establishing morphogen gradients in developing tissues, highlighting their individual and combined roles in spatial distribution and positional information.

Contribution

It introduces a model analyzing the separate and joint effects of diffusion and cytonemes in morphogen gradient formation.

Findings

Both diffusion and cytonemes can establish morphogen gradients.

Cytonemes enable direct cell-to-cell morphogen transfer.

Combined mechanisms improve gradient reliability.

Abstract

Spatial distributions of morphogens provide positional information in developing systems, but how the distributions are established and maintained remains an open problem. Transport by diffusion has been the traditional mechanism, but recent experimental work has shown that cells can also communicate by filopodia-like structures called cytonemes that make direct cell-to-cell contacts. Here we investigate the roles each may play individually in a complex tissue and how they can jointly establish a reliable spatial distribution of a morphogen.