Spatiotemporal analysis of different mechanisms for interpreting morphogen gradients.

During development, multicellular organisms must accurately control both temporal and spatial aspects of tissue patterning. This is often achieved using morphogens, signaling molecules that form spatially varying concentrations and so encode positional information. Typical analysis of morphogens assumes that spatial information is decoded in steady state by measuring the value of the morphogen concentration. However, recent experimental work suggests that both pre-steady-state readout and measurement of spatial and temporal derivatives of the morphogen concentration can play important roles in defining boundaries. Here, we undertake a detailed theoretical and numerical study of the accuracy of patterning—both in space and time—in models where readout is provided not by the morphogen concentration but by its spatial and temporal derivatives. In both cases we find that accurate patterning can be achieved, with sometimes even smaller errors than directly reading the morphogen concentration. We further demonstrate that such models provide other potential benefits to the system, such as the ability to switch on and off gene response with a high degree of spatiotemporal accuracy. Finally, we discuss how such derivatives might be calculated biologically and examine these models in relation to Sonic Hedgehog signaling in the vertebrate central nervous system. We show that, when coupled to a downstream transcriptional network, pre-steady-state measurement of the temporal change in the Shh morphogen is a plausible mechanism for determining precise gene boundaries in both space and time.