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

我们身体的器官是如何控制它们的形状和大小的？我们知道，如果它们不能做到这一点，我们就会过度生长，经常会患上癌症。如果我们能理解这些控制系统，也许我们就能理解当组织过度生长时会发生什么，并继续开发更有效的治疗方法。适当的生长控制需要许多细胞的协调运动和重排，因此这些细胞必须具有相互沟通的机制。有趣的是，现在人们了解到，如果一个器官内的细胞能够相互协调以建立方向感，这有助于它们调节自己的形状和大小。然而，我们不知道这种方向感是如何与生长控制机制协调的。在过去，果蝇翅膀已经被成功地用于研究协调生长控制，揭示了许多与人类生长控制相似的地方。例如，已知Fat和Dachsous蛋白可以调节果蝇和人类的组织形状和大小。我们计划在果蝇翅膀上做实验，研究Fat和Dachsous的功能。我们还将使用计算模型，用数学方法描述这些过程，把我们的实验证据放在一起，帮助我们理解这些机制。然后，我们可以使用这些计算模型来预测，如果我们以某种方式操纵它，系统应该如何表现。然后，我们可以通过进一步的实验来检验这些预测，这将使我们能够决定最初的假设是否正确，并最终了解增长和方向是如何协调的。

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.