The plastic variation of insect wing shape across different environments has been thoroughly documented. However, it remains unclear which aspects of development – such as specific gene regulation, cell growth, and intercellular interactions – are influenced by the environment to produce this variation. The project aims to address this question by combining in-silico developmental modeling with empirical morphometric analysis of the Drosophila wing.

Our group previously constructed a two-dimensional apical vertex model simulating Drosophila wing development. The model is based on the assumption that all morphogenetic movements can be explained by a finite set of behaviors and properties of cells and extracellular structures. Early model versions successfully reproduced the broad developmental dynamics of wild-type wing formation, as well as some distinct mutant phenotypes, solely by tuning the parameters governing the mechanical properties of cells at the tissue or system-wide level.

As part of my PhD project, I have expanded and refined this model to capture finer-scale variation (such as population-level differences), and to simulate all experimentally observable phases of the pupal stage. To assess population-level variation, I conducted an experiment in which Drosophila lines from multiple homogeneous genetic backgrounds were raised at different temperatures and population densities. Wing morphology was characterized using landmark-based geometric morphometrics, resulting in a large dataset of imaged and digitized wings.

The project’s primary objectives encompass 1) simulating the pupal development of a representative wild-type morphology, 2) reproducing the direction and extent of experimentally observed variation through controlled parameter perturbations, and 3) interpreting these results in the context of environment-phenotype and environment-genotype-phenotype interactions. The results are expected to provide new insights into the broader principles governing environmental influences on morphogenesis, and to open the way for generating new hypotheses on how specific environmental changes drive morphological differences.