Speaker
Description
I will discuss new work about the use of dynamical systems to understand the early development of an embryo, in particular the way that cells transition from a pluripotent stem cell state to become specialised, complex, functional cells such as neurons, heart cells or the cells in a flower petal. I will describe how a dynamical systems viewpoint leads to new analysis methods for state-of-the-art single-cell data that quantifies the activity of essentially all genes in the cells in a given tissue, such as the early heart. And how ideas from catastrophe and bifurcation theory are used to construct a model of how the cells transition through a complex network of intermediate cells states before adopting their end state. I will also discuss how this leads to new mathematical results and conjectures about how boundary conditions on parameter space force complex bifurcation structures in the interior of the parameter space.