2025/11/28(Fri) 13:30 -15:00 一樓演講廳 1F, Auditorium
Title
Tiling mechanisms of the fly visual system
Speaker
Prof. Makoto Sato (Institute for Frontier Science Initiative, Kanazawa University, Japan)Abstract
Tile patterns are formed by the repeated packing of cellular units and are found in a wide variety of biological structures such as the compound eyes of insects, columnar structures in the brain, lobules in the liver, and auditory epithelium in the inner ear. Hexagonal tiling patterns are common in biology, such as insect compound eyes and beehives. This is thought to be due to the physical properties of the hexagonal tiles: structural rigidity, minimal perimeter, and efficient space filling. In other words, the hexagonal pattern is the most energy-efficient structure.
However, the compound eyes of shrimps and lobsters exhibit a tetragonal tiling pattern. The compound eye of the fly also normally exhibits a hexagonal tiling pattern, but in some mutants it changes to a tetragonal pattern. This suggests that the tiling pattern is not controlled by physical stability alone. We demonstrate that the tiling pattern of the compound eye is controlled by a geometrical partitioning mechanism in addition to physical constraints.
Visual information received in the ommatidia is transmitted to the columnar structures in the brain, which also have a hexagonal arrangement. Thus, the tile patterns found in the ommatidia in the compound eye and the columns in the brain are likely to contribute to visual information processing. Possible mechanisms controlling the tiling patterns of the columns are also discussed.
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Carrillo et al., PLOS Computational Biology 21(4): e1011909 (2025).
Togashi et al., Developmental Biology 506,1-6 (2024).
Hayashi et al., Current Biology 32, 2101-2109 (2022).
Language
演講語言 (Language): in English