Fig. 4.

Top: A schematic diagram capturing the known qualitative features of delta-notch chemical signaling. Notch inhibits Delta within a cell, and Delta activates Notch in neighboring cells. Bottom: At one stage in development, the C. elegans vulva is a line of six cells. Under a mutation of the let-23 gene, each cell receives approximately the same amount of external signaling, so we can assume that their dynamics are the same; thus, the system can be represented with a regular network. The alternating color is the balanced coloring $\bowtie$ associated with the critical pattern space $P^{{\mu }_1}$ for the Notch pathway