TY - JOUR T1 - Order and Stochastic Dynamics in Drosophila Planar Cell Polarity A1 - Burak, Yoram A1 - Shraiman, Boris I. Y1 - 2009/12/24 N2 - Author Summary Epithelial tissues are often polarized in a preferred direction which determines, for example, the direction of hair growth on mammalian skin, the orientation of scales in fish, the alignment of ommatidia in the fly eye and of sensory hair cells in the vertebrate cochlea. This in-plane polarization, known as planar cell polarity, is one of the morphogenetic fields that play a role in tissue patterning during development. Here we focus on planar cell polarity in the fly wing, where protein localization and inter-cellular ligand-receptor interactions combine with an unknown orienting signal to establish planar cell polarity of the wing epithelium. We demonstrate an analogy between this process and models of ferromagnetism in physical systems that have been studied extensively using the tools of statistical mechanics. The analogy helps in understanding how local interactions between cells can lead to global polarization order and elucidate the role of global orienting signals and the dependence of the dynamics of the process on parameters. We demonstrate that in the absence of an external orienting signal swirling patterns should emerge due to random noise. We propose ways to test this prediction and ways to quantify the magnitude and spatial variation of the unknown external orienting signal. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 5 IS - 12 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000628 SP - e1000628 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000628 ER -