Multicellular pattern formation

Understanding the self-regulatory mechanisms controlling the spatial and temporal structure of multicellular organisms represents one of the major challenges in molecular biology. Although high-throughput data have become available with the advances in experimental technologies at a large scale, measuring gene expression levels at a high spatial resolution remains extremely difficult. As a result, the study of genetic regulatory networks in the light of spatial expression patterns still relies mainly on qualitative data. This leads to the question of how to fit the parameters of a gene regulatory network model such that a purely qualitatively defined pattern can be reproduced.