| Clonal dominance is a phenomenon whereby the descendants of one of a few founder cells contribute disproportionally to the system. In contexts such as bacterial growth, this phenomenon is often attributed to pre-existing genetic or positional propensities for dominance. However, it is increasingly also documented in development, where such biases should be absent. The Drosophila melanogaster egg chamber is an ideal system for studies of the latter type of clonal dominance: When cells in the egg chamber epithelium divide, they remain connected by so-called ring canals. Cell lineage trees can therefore be reconstructed by tracing the networks of interconnected cells. Using a modification of the ‘Forest-Fire’ model, we demonstrate that dominant clones in this system can emerge spontaneously without pre-existing advantages as a result of cell divisions being coupled through ring canals, so that a cell entering division can also induce some of its linked neighbors to divide. |  |
Published in: J. Imran Alsous, J. Rozman, R. A. Marmion, A. Košmrlj, and S. Y. Shvartsman, Nat. Phys. (2021)