Experimental Determination of Intrinsic Drosophila Embryo Coordinates by Evolutionary Computation

Early fruit fly embryo development begins with the formation of a chemical blueprint that guides cellular movements and the development of organs and tissues. This blueprint sets the intrinsic spatial coordinates of the embryo. The coordinates are curvilinear from the start, becoming more curvilinear as cells start coherent movements several hours into development. This dynamic aspect of the curvature is an important characteristic of early embryogenesis: characterizing it is crucial for quantitative analysis and dynamic modeling of development. This presents a number of methodological problems for the elastic deformation of 3D and 4D data from confocal microscopy, to standardize images and follow temporal changes. The parameter searches for these deformations present hard optimization problems. Here we describe our evolutionary computation approaches to these problems. We outline some of the immediate applications of these techniques to crucial problems in Drosophila developmen-