Achievement

The development of a multicellular organism includes precise initiation and positioning of different cell types in a dynamic landscape integrated by spatiotemporal patterns of cell division, expansion, and movement. To better assess the complexity of development, a toolbox of computational resources for quantitative analysis of cell growth patterns and morphogenesis was established. The training of the tools was on the stem cells of the shoot meristem of plants. UC Riverside's ChemGen IGERT trainee Moses Tataw and his co-researchers, guided by Professors A.R.Chowdhury and G.V. Reddy, developed the computational toolkit for the analysis of patterns of stem primordia development using chemically-regulated mutants to gain insights in growth parameters from the local/single-cell level to the global/organ level. This toolkit is a key step towards the development of a dynamic gene expression atlas incorporating distinct cell behaviors and gene expressions that govern development.