Finding the Last Bits of Positional Information

In a developing embryo, information about the position of cells is encoded in the concentrations of morphogen molecules. In the fruit fly, the local concentrations of just a handful of proteins encoded by the gap genes are sufficient to specify position with a precision comparable to the spacing between cells along the anterior-posterior axis. This matches the precision of downstream events such as the striped patterns of expression in the pair-rule genes, but is not quite sufficient to define unique identities for individual cells. We demonstrate theoretically that this information gap can be bridged if positional errors are spatially correlated, with correlation lengths ~ 20% of the embryo length. We then show experimentally that these correlations are present, with the required strength, in the fluctuating positions of the pair-rule stripes, and this can be traced back to the gap genes. Taking account of these correlations, the available information matches the information needed for unique cellular specification, within error bars of ~ 2%. These observation support a precisionist view of information flow through the underlying genetic networks, in which accurate signals are available from the start and preserved as they are transformed into the final spatial patterns.