Organ function is at least partially shaped and constrained by the organization of their constituent cells. Extensive investigation has revealed mechanisms explaining how these patterns are generated, with less being known about their functional relevance. In this paper, a methodology to discretize and quantitatively analyze cellular patterning is described. By performing global organ-scale cellular interaction mapping, the organization of cells can be extracted and analyzed using network science. This provides a means to take the developmental analysis of cellular organization in complex organisms beyond qualitative descriptions and provides data-driven approaches to inferring cellular function. The bridging of a structure–function relationship in hypocotyl epidermal cell patterning through global topological analysis provides support for this approach. The analysis of cellular topologies from patterning mutants further enables the contribution of gene activity toward the organizational properties of tissues to be linked, bridging molecular and tissue scales. This systems-based approach to investigate multicellular complexity paves the way to uncovering the principles of complex organ design and achieving predictive genotype–phenotype mapping.

器官功能至少部分地受到其组成细胞的组织的影响。广泛的研究揭示了解释这些模式如何产生的机制，而对其功能相关性的了解较少。在本文中，描述了一种离散化和定量分析细胞模式的方法。通过执行全局器官规模的细胞相互作用作图，可以使用网络科学提取和分析细胞的组织。这提供了一种手段，可以对定性描述之外的复杂生物中的细胞组织进行发展分析，并提供数据驱动的方法来推断细胞功能。通过全局拓扑分析桥接下胚轴表皮细胞中的结构-功能关系，为该方法提供了支持。通过分析突变体形成的细胞拓扑结构，可以进一步分析基因活性对待连接组织的组织特性的贡献，从而弥合分子和组织规模。这种基于系统的研究多细胞复杂性的方法为揭示复杂器官设计的原理和实现预测性基因型-表型作图铺平了道路。