Dynamics and mechanical stability of the developing dorsoventral organizer of the wing imaginal disc

Shaping the primordia during development relies on forces and mechanisms able to control cell segregation. In the imaginal discs of Drosophila the cellular populations that will give rise to the dorsal and ventral parts on the wing blade are segregated and do not intermingle. A cellular population that becomes specified by the boundary of the dorsal and ventral cellular domains, the so-called organizer, controls this process. In this paper we study the dynamics and stability of the dorsal-ventral organizer of the wing imaginal disc of Drosophila as cell proliferation advances. Our approach is based on a vertex model to perform in silico experiments that are fully dynamical and take into account the available experimental data such as: cell packing properties, orientation of the cellular divisions, response upon membrane ablation, and robustness to mechanical perturbations induced by fast growing clones. Our results shed light on the complex interplay between the cytoskeleton mechanics, the cell cycle, the cell growth, and the cellular interactions in order to shape the dorsal-ventral organizer as a robust source of positional information and a lineage controller. Specifically, we elucidate the necessary and sufficient ingredients that enforce its functionality: distinctive mechanical properties, including increased tension, longer cell cycle duration, and a cleavage criterion that satisfies the Hertwig rule. Our results provide novel insights into the developmental mechanisms that drive the dynamics of the DV organizer and set a definition of the so-called Notch fence model in quantitative terms.