Correlations Between the Morphology of Sonic Hedge

Authors: Qiuping Xu Heather Jamniczky Diane Hu Rebecca M Green Ralph S Marcucio Benedikt Hallgrimsson Washington Mio

Publish Date: 2015/04/22

Volume: 42, Issue: 3, Pages: 379-386

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Abstract

Quantitative analysis of gene expression domains and investigation of relationships between gene expression and developmental and phenotypic outcomes are central to advancing our understanding of the genotype–phenotype map Gene expression domains typically have smooth but irregular shapes lacking homologous landmarks making it difficult to analyze shape variation with the tools of landmarkbased geometric morphometrics In addition 3D image acquisition and processing introduce many artifacts that further exacerbate the problem To overcome these difficulties this paper presents a method that combines optical projection tomography scanning a shape regularization technique and a landmarkfree approach to quantify variation in the morphology of Sonic hedgehog expression domains in the frontonasal ectodermal zone FEZ of avians and investigate relationships with embryonic craniofacial shape The model reveals axes in FEZ and embryonichead morphospaces along which variation exhibits a sharp linear relationship at high statistical significance The technique should be applicable to analyses of other 3D biological structures that can be modeled as smooth surfaces and have illdefined shape

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