Neighborhood-informed positional information for precise cell identity specification (opens in new tab)

During development, cells reliably establish their identities, a process that is enabled in part by positional information encoded in gene expression patterns. Previous works showed that cells in Drosophila embryos can utilize this information to decode their position along the anterior-posterior axis with a 1% embryo-length positional precision. However, this precision is insufficient to uniquely determine position, leading to a positional information gap. Here, we propose a neighborhood-inf...