During early development, tissues and organs begin to form through the shifting, splitting, and growing of many thousands of cells. A team of researchers headed by MIT engineers has now developed a geometric deep learning method, called MultiCell, that can predict, minute by minute, how individual cells will fold, divide, and rearrange during a fruit fly’s earliest stage of growth. The model learns, then predicts, how certain geometric properties of individual cells will change as a fruit fly develops. To do this, the model records and tracks properties such as a cell’s position, and whether it is touching a neighboring cell at a given moment. The researchers applied the new model to videos of developing fruit fly embryos, each of which starts as a cluster of about 5,000 cells. They found that the model could predict, with 90% accuracy, how each of the 5,000 cells would fold, shift, and rearrange, minute by minute, during the first hour of development, as the embryo morphs from a smooth, uniform shape into more defined structures and features. “This very initial phase is known as gastrulation, which takes place over roughly one hour, when individual cells are rearranging on a time scale of minutes,” said research lead Ming Guo, PhD, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “By accurately modeling this early period, we can start to uncover how local cell interactions give rise to global tissues and organisms.” Guo and colleagues suggest that the new method may one day be applied to predict the…
