TY - JOUR
T1 - Order from disorder
T2 - Self-organization in mammalian hair patterning
AU - Wang, Yanshu
AU - Badea, Tudor
AU - Nathans, Jeremy
PY - 2006/12/26
Y1 - 2006/12/26
N2 - Hairs, feathers, and scales normally exhibit precise orientations with respect to the body axes. In Frizzled6 (Fz6)-/- mice, the global orientation of hair follicles is disrupted, leading to waves, whorls, and tufts, each comprising many hundreds of hairs. By analyzing the orientation of developing hair follicles, we observed that the nearly parallel arrangement of wild-type (WT) hairs arises from fields of imperfectly aligned follicles, and that the Fz6-/- hair patterns arise from fields of grossly misoriented or randomly oriented follicles. Despite their large size, both mutant and WT hair follicles display a remarkable and unexpected plasticity, reorienting on a time scale of days in what seems to be a self-organized refinement process. The essential features of this process can be studied with a simple cellular automata model in which a local consensus "rule" acts iteratively to bias each hair's orientation in favor of the average orientation of its neighbors. These experiments define two systems for hair orientation: a global orienting system that acts early in development and is Fz6-depandent, and a local self-organizing system that acts later and is Fz6 independent.
AB - Hairs, feathers, and scales normally exhibit precise orientations with respect to the body axes. In Frizzled6 (Fz6)-/- mice, the global orientation of hair follicles is disrupted, leading to waves, whorls, and tufts, each comprising many hundreds of hairs. By analyzing the orientation of developing hair follicles, we observed that the nearly parallel arrangement of wild-type (WT) hairs arises from fields of imperfectly aligned follicles, and that the Fz6-/- hair patterns arise from fields of grossly misoriented or randomly oriented follicles. Despite their large size, both mutant and WT hair follicles display a remarkable and unexpected plasticity, reorienting on a time scale of days in what seems to be a self-organized refinement process. The essential features of this process can be studied with a simple cellular automata model in which a local consensus "rule" acts iteratively to bias each hair's orientation in favor of the average orientation of its neighbors. These experiments define two systems for hair orientation: a global orienting system that acts early in development and is Fz6-depandent, and a local self-organizing system that acts later and is Fz6 independent.
KW - Frizzled
KW - Hair development
KW - Hair follicle
KW - Planar cell polarity
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U2 - 10.1073/pnas.0609712104
DO - 10.1073/pnas.0609712104
M3 - Article
C2 - 17172440
AN - SCOPUS:33845951172
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 103
SP - 19800
EP - 19805
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
IS - 52
ER -