Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the understanding of collective cell migration through mathematical modeling. The focus of the author's work is modeling development of the zebrafish lateral line, a sensory network that detects patterns of water movement. This network is established early in development by a migrating cell collective, which deposits sensory organs as it moves across the zebrafish embryo. In the last 15 years, the lateral line has emerged as an excellent system for studying the mechanisms that drive collective cell migration. Many papers have recently been published that discuss key players involved in lateral line development and the interactions they have with one another. However, mathematical modeling of lateral line development has remained fairly limited, and many open questions remain. In this work, the author addresses many of these questions by modeling a wide variety of aspects of lateral line development, including migration, establishment of receptor polarity in the cell collective, cell cooperation, and deposition. Each model is inspired by experimental results, which are in turn used for model validation. These mathematical models serve to suggest valuable future experiments and make predictions for collective behavior in the lateral line system