How do the atypical cadherins Fat and Dachsous integrate growth and patterning during development?

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How do the organs in our body control their shape and size? We know that when they fail to do this, we get overgrowth, and frequently cancer. If we can understand these control systems, perhaps we will be able to understand what happens when tissues overgrow and go on to develop more effective treatments. Proper growth control requires the coordinated movements and rearrangements of many cells and so these cells must have mechanisms to communicate with each other. Interestingly, it is now understood that if the cells within an organ can coordinate with one another to build a sense of direction, this helps them to regulate their shape and size. However, we don't know how this sense of direction coordinates with the growth control mechanisms. In the past, the fruit fly wing has been used successfully to study coordinated growth control, revealing many parallels to human growth control. For example, the proteins Fat and Dachsous are known to regulate tissue shape and size both in flies and humans. We plan to do experiments in the fruit fly wing to study how Fat and Dachsous function. We will also use computational models, which describe these processes mathematically, to put our experimental evidence together and help us to understand these mechanisms. We can then use these computational models to make predictions about how the system should behave if we manipulate it in some way. We can then test these predictions by doing further experiments, which will allow us to decide if the original assumptions were correct and ultimately understand how growth and direction are coordinated.