Among all multicellular organisms, Caenorhabditis elegans offers a unique experimental system to study phenotypic robustness because of its remarkably reproducible development. In our lab, we focus on seam cells, which show stem cell-like properties being able to divide both symmetrically and asymmetrically in order to self-renew or generate daughter cells that differentiate into hypodermis and neurons, and this happens in a fairly invariant manner. To improve our understanding of the seam cell gene network, we have started focusing on key transcription factors that are thought to be its core members, such as
elt-1,
egl-18 and
ceh-16. We have used single molecule FISH to quantify the expression levels of these factors in wild-type and mutant backgrounds and characterise their putative interactions. Preliminary data suggest that individual seam cells may be subject to different quantitative relationships based on their position along the anterior-posterior axis. In order to evaluate the stability of these interactions we have built a preliminary Boolean network model based on our smFISH data. In silico simulations have been used to evaluate the robustness of various network architectures upon perturbation. Our aim is to integrate experimental and theoretical work to understand the structure of the seam cell fate gene network and its resilience to perturbation.