Original title: Point Processes and the Statistics of Cellular Neighborhoods in Simple Multicellular Organisms
Authors: Anand Srinivasan, Steph Hohn, Raymond E. Goldstein
The article uncovers a surprising type of randomness in cell arrangements within various multicellular organisms. Instead of neat and orderly patterns, the spaces around cells, found using Voronoi tessellations, follow diverse distributions resembling gamma distributions. Focusing on the alga $Volvox$ as a case study, where cells are surrounded by an extracellular matrix (ECM), researchers propose models where this matrix generation involves randomness. Their study demonstrates that these random processes, creating the Voronoi shapes around cells, match gamma distributions. These findings emphasize how inherent biological randomness significantly influences the structure of specific tissues across different organisms, shedding light on a universal aspect of tissue architecture affected by natural variability.
Original article: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.11939