Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Wild-type zebrafish are named for their dark and light stripes, but mutant zebrafish feature variable skin patterns, including spots and labyrinth curves. All of these patterns form as the fish grow due to the interactions of tens of thousands of pigment cells in the skin. This leads to the question: how do cell interactions change to create mutant patterns? The longterm biological motivation for my work is to shed light on this question — I strive to help link genes, cell behavior, and visible animal characteristics. Toward this goal, I build agent-based models to describe cell behavior in growing fish body and fin-shaped domains. However, my models are stochastic and have many parameters, and comparing simulated patterns, alternative models, and fish images is often a qualitative process. This, in turn, drives my mathematical goal: I am interested in developing methods for quantifying variable cell-based patterns and linking computational and analytically tractable models. In this talk, I will overview our agent-based models for body and fin pattern formation, share how topological data analysis can be used to quantify cell-based patterns and models, and discuss ongoing work on relating agent-based and continuum models for zebrafish patterns.