Developmental motives in cerebral cortex development

Cortical neurogenesis is a complex process in which dividing cells have the ability to acquire specific fates and eventually differentiate toward a final cell type. The adoption of a particular cell state is the result of intrinsic genetic programs, which regulate cell behavior and cell-cell interactions, and the influence of environmental cues. Insight into the mechanisms underlying corticogenesis is provided by the genealogical history of every precursor cell. We use spectral clustering to identify recurrent cell division patterns on reconstructed cortical lineages of the mouse cortex. We evaluate the degree of similarities between precursors types and find the most
likely differentiation paths that leads to the production of different cell types. The resulting model constitutes a compact probabilistic finite state machine description of the developmental process: at any time cells are found in particular states and, dispite the presence of multiple sequences of states, some of the paths are more likely to occur. The obtained state diagram represent compact state machine description of the developmental process, and enable us to evaluate the genetic distance between precursors.