Novel metrics reveal new structure and unappreciated heterogeneity in Caenorhabditis elegans development
Fig 6
Evidence for cell fate control over cell cycle timing.
A) Illustration of the transformation heuristic. For each WT destination lineage (black dots) a diameter D is calculated as the maximum intragroup intersection branch distance. The transformation efficiency is then defined as the fraction of WT destination lineages that fall within diameter D of each RNAi origin lineage (colored squares). In some cases, the transformation efficiency is 0 but the RNAi lineage has WT origin neighbors (green square) suggesting that the RNAi perturbed lineage maintained its original fate in terms of cell cycle timing. In other cases, this value is 0 and the RNAi origin lineage has no WT neighbors (orange square) suggesting that the RNAi perturbed lineage has both lost its original fate and failed to acquire the pattern of cell cycle timing of the destination lineage. In a minority of cases the RNAi origin lineage is within D of 1 or more WT destination sublineages and a transformation efficiency is reported (magenta square). B) Histogram of the number of WT destination neighbors that homeotically transformed RNAi lineages have, using the heuristic defined in A. C) Histogram of the number of new WT neighbors that perturbed RNAi lineages have. D) Heatmaps representing the transformation heuristic in A. for homeotically transformed lineages with at least 1 WT destination neighbor. The genes that induce these transformations and functions are listed alongside the corresponding heatmap of transformation.