The fact that humans and other living organisms can develop and grow from a single cell relies on a process called embryonic development. For healthy tissue to form, cells in the embryo have to organize themselves in the right way in the right place at the right time. When this process doesn't go right, it can result in birth defects, impaired tissue regeneration or cancer. All of this makes understanding how different cell types organize into a complex tissue architecture one of the most fundamental questions in developmental biology.
While researchers are still some distance from fully understanding the process, a group of Brown University scientists has spent the past handful of years helping the field inch closer. Their secret? A branch of mathematics called topology.
For example, in an animal embryo, the outer layer of cells goes on to form skin, the middle layer forms muscle and bone, while the innermost layer forms the liver or lungs. Cells within each layer will preferentially adhere to each other, sorting apart from cells in other layers that go on to form other parts of the body.
The hiccup with the original system was that it is a slow and labor-intensive process. The algorithm painstakingly compared these topological features one by one against those in other sets of cell positions to determine how topologically different or similar they are.
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