Figure 1.

Schematic of the modeled biological phenomenon and how machine-learning is used to design the model. (a) During early embryogenesis, a relatively featureless embryo develops distinct axial patterns along with a distinct outer layer known as the epidermis (figure of larva was inspired by [1] (p. 11)). The distinct colors represent the origin of the differentiation of the embryo into distinct morphological features. The cells on the boundary (thick empty circles) represent the epidermis. (b) A model with unknown parameters is trained using machine-learning, that uses gradient-descent-like methods to ‘backpropagate’ the error between the observed and target patterns to the model parameters, to produce the desired pattern.